The FME Evangelist

A Spotters Guide to Textured Formats in FME

April 19th, 2010

Hi all,
As a follow-up from previous posts about appearance and texture support, I was asked:

“In each example I found, the output file is always in pdf format.
Is it possible to build 3d textures through these transformers in KML, or others formats?”

Yes, it is true, I do have a propensity for using PDF format in my examples. It isn’t that Adobe are paying me money or anything, but I do find it excellent for simple examples that anyone can follow.

Anyway, the answer to the question is, yes, there are other formats which support textures. I asked the development team for a list and this is what I received:

• 3DPDF (Writing only)
• Geodatabase (Read/Write)
• 3ds (R/W)
• OBJ (R/W)
• Collada (R/W)
• CityGML (R/W)
• SketchUp (R/W)
• KML (Yes, it internally uses COLLADA, R/W)

Although PDF is my favourite, it is write only, and a relatively slow writer at that. Also larger models do tend to take ages to open up for viewing.

Geodatabase texture support became available for FME2010. It is likely to be a bigger deal for ArcGIS 10 which I understand will be more 3D-oriented.

KML has texture support because it internally uses the COLLADA format, which supports this.

SketchUp is where I make the note that this list applies to the latest 2011 beta, and that not all of these will be in 2010. That’s because SketchUp WRITING is currently being implemented; it might be in the latest beta but if not it should appear in the very near future.

The other note to make is that this list is only texture-supporting formats. There are other formats which support 3D features (such as Shape and AutoCAD) but which don’t yet have appearance support.

Hope this info is helpful,

100 Things to Do with FME!
Here’s another of my inspirational (hopefully) list of 100 different uses for FME; from the obvious and straightforward, to the wierd and wonderful!

Number 2 in a Series of 100: Support your Asset Management Systems

Entry Filed under: 3D, BIM, Data Transformation, FME Desktop, GIS, Miscellaneous, Raster