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Triangle Irregular Network (TIN) Formats?

posted by Satri on Thursday January 25, @07:24PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the if-everything-was-standard... dept.

Does anyone knows if there's a standard format for georeferenced triangle irregular networks? What I found with a quick search is a table of TIN data structures from this short page on TINs. Here's code and algorithm for TINs. Additional information was found on this page and on the Delaunay triangulation and Voronoi diagram wikipedia pages. But any clue on a standard format? Thanks!

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• 3D TIN formats

  (Score:3, Informative)

  by Xenon (77) on Friday January 26, @01:44AM (#1203)
  ( http://3dnature.com/ )

  I've encountered TINs stored in DXF files as polygon entities. Also the 3D variant of the ESRI Shapefile format (which historically only 3D Analyst understood) can store 3D polygon data, and I've seen TINs stored that way as well.

  --
  3D Terrain: http://3d-terrain.com/
  • Re:3D TIN formats

    (Score:3, Informative)

    by redgeographics (145) <reversethis-{moc ... der} {ta} {snah}> on Friday January 26, @03:15AM (#1204)
    ( http://www.redgeographics.com/ )

    As far as I know, you can store a TIN in any format that supports 3D polygons (because that's essentially what a TIN is).

    Most of the TIN's I produced were stored in dxf, but that's only because they were then imported in 3D Studio Max and dxf was the only georeferenced way to do that.

    --
    Hans van der Maarel

    [ Parent ]
• Standard Geographic Data?

  (Score:1, Interesting)

  by Anonymous Voxel on Friday January 26, @07:24AM (#1205)

  Even being a few years away from the GEO market, i do not believe in such a standard. For import / export you could try the "old" GENERATE format from ESRI. It is a plain text file format that has a quite simple definition for TIN data.
  
  Until ArcInfo 7 it was there.
  
  Good luck.
• GDAL/OGR and TINs: not there yet.

  (Score:2)

  by Satri (3) on Tuesday January 30, @02:27PM (#1210)
  ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )

  See Frank Warmerdam's answer [maptools.org]. In short: no standard format, no GDAL/OGR driver.
  
  I guess a standard was to format georeferenced TINs would be welcomed!
• PLY - Polygon File Format for TINs

  (Score:2)

  by Satri (3) on Wednesday January 31, @11:16AM (#1212)
  ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )

  This is an interesting related file format [uwa.edu.au]:
  This document presents the PLY polygon file format, a format for storing graphical objects that are described as a collection of polygons. Our goal is to provide a format that is simple and easy to implement but that is general enough to be useful for a wide range of models. The file format has two sub-formats: an ASCII representation for easily getting started, and a binary version for compact storage and for rapid saving and loading. We hope that this format will promote the exchange of graphical object between programs and also between groups of people.
  
  The interesting part as a TIN format is:
  The typical information in a PLY file contains just two elements, the (x,y,z) triples for vertices and the vertex indices for each face.
• GRASS GIS can generate TINs

  (Score:2)

  by Satri (3) on Wednesday January 31, @11:47AM (#1213)
  ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )

  ... if the original points are available.
  
  Read more on GRASS GIS support for Delaunay TINs [grass.itc.it], which can afterwards be used with GDAL with this driver [gdal.org].