We are proud to announce our alpha test of our XYZ Smasher tool. We invite members of the industry to contact us for the latest trial version of our software which will be released on a demo license (valid until the end of May 2020).
Core functionality:
System Requirements:
We have built the software for the Windows 10 environment. It will come as a .exe file with some source folders for additional information. No installation is required to use the software. As of this version it is a serial thread process, so should only ever load a single core of your machine (we may look at parallel compute in future releases). While it can smash exceptionally large rasters, it will use a large amount of RAM. For this tool, more RAM = better performance. In general we only use machines with 32GB+ installed, but the tool will work on machines with less.
Use Cases:
We think that the current tool will be useful for the following uses:
Core functionality:
- Rapidly convert large rasters (GDAL formats: .tif, .asc and .sdat) into standard space delimited .xyz format
- Use an upper and lower threshold to screen values that aren't of interest
- Allow a user specified 'nodata' value to be screened and removed from the .xyz files
- SMASH - our algorithm to break up massive xyz files into bitesize chunks
- This is an Alpha: if there is functionality that you would find helpful that doesn't already exist in the tool, we'd like to know. This could then be included in the formal release of the software later this year.
System Requirements:
We have built the software for the Windows 10 environment. It will come as a .exe file with some source folders for additional information. No installation is required to use the software. As of this version it is a serial thread process, so should only ever load a single core of your machine (we may look at parallel compute in future releases). While it can smash exceptionally large rasters, it will use a large amount of RAM. For this tool, more RAM = better performance. In general we only use machines with 32GB+ installed, but the tool will work on machines with less.
Use Cases:
We think that the current tool will be useful for the following uses:
- CAD: Raster imports take a long time in some CAD applications, especially if the raster file is large. We instead would recommend using this software to automatically process the raster into point .xyz data for use in your CAD or BIM model, since this 'vector' type data is better suited to these applications.
- Hydraulic Modellers: most modern FVM type 2D and 3D unstructured mesh models are built using .xyz data instead of rasters to get the base topography/bathymetry. We would recommend this software to rapidly transform your raster data to .xyz, but also use the SMASH function to keep individual file sizes below 2GB. We know of some software that can handle multiple smaller files but not singular large files.
- We'd like to hear from you: there are probably more use cases we haven't thought about!