2014-09-11

Transform 3D Triangular Polygons into TIN Surface

Assume that the source polygons are clean. i.e.
- There are no gaps and no overlaps between adjoining triangles.
- Common vertex of adjoining triangles has same elevation (z-coordinate).

There is a solution in this article.
How to clip TIN Surfaces

Summary:
1) FaceReplacer replaces the triangular polygons with faces.
2) Aggregator creates a multi-surface from the faces.
3) Triangulator transforms the multi-surface into a TIN surface.
If orientation of triangles could be Right Hand Rule, their orientation should be changed to Left Hand Rule before the FaceReplacer.

The purpose of the article is not to create new TIN surface, is to clip a given TIN surface. So, the solution is appropriate one. But it's not so efficient for newly creating a TIN surface based on millions triangular polygons.
If you allow that the original triangle shapes will not be preserved exactly as parts of the resulting TIN, this may be a much more efficient approach.

1) Chopper decomposes the triangles into vertex points.
2) CoordinateExtractor extracts x, y of each point.
3) AttributeRounder rounds x, y to avoid mismatching caused by slight computational error.
4) StringConcatenator concatenates x, y to create a string value.
5) DuplicateRemover removes duplicate points using the coordinate string as key.
6) TINGenerator creates a TIN surface based on the points.
In general, the Matcher can be used to remove duplicate points. But it's too inefficient (consumes long time and huge memory space) if there are millions points.

There could be more efficient solutions. If you know, please inform to me!

FME 2014 SP3 build 14391

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