xeokit LAS Conversion Tests

See also: glTF Conversion Tests >>  See also: IFC Conversion Tests >>

The xeokit SDK empowers us to quickly load large, full-precision LAS models on the Web, enabling seamless browser viewing within seconds. To achieve this, we use our CLI tools to pre-convert LAS models into xeokit's efficient and fast-loading native XKT format.

Our conversion, and our LASLoaderPlugin, only supports LAS/lAZ files up to LAS v1.3. We do not support LAS v1.4.

We routinely validate the effectiveness of our conversion tools through tests with xeokit's conversion test suite. This suite performs batch conversions on a selected set of LAS models, resulting in the XKT models listed in the "Converted LAS Models" section below.

In this page, you'll also find detailed information on how we configure and execute the conversion process, providing insights for establishing your own LAS conversion pipeline with xeokit.

Converted LAS Models

In the table below are the results from our most recent LAS conversion run. On the far right, select "View" to observe the converted model in a xeokit web viewer. Choose "Log" to inspect the conversion log associated with that model. Additionally, "Link" provides a link through which you can hot-load the converted model into a xeokit web viewer.

las Filelas Size (Mb)XKT Size (Mb)Conversion Time (Secs)Converted XKT
samples
Africa_Palace.las 536.5584 0 13.44 View Debug Log Link Zip
Nalls_Pumpkin_Hill.las 33.0145 0 7.37 View Debug Log Link Zip
autzen.las 56.3510 0 19.45 View Debug Log Link Zip



LAS Conversion System Configuration

We're running our converter on a fairly well-specced system, which keeps the office cat warm on a cold day. Below is a summary of our system specifications, along with the versions of the CLI converter tools and xeokit SDK we used. In this case, we're running everything on Linux, but you can just as easily run it on Windows and Mac O/S.

Date Mon Feb 26 2024 12:05:22 GMT+0100 (Central European Standard Time)
CPU Manufacturer Intel
CPU Brand Xeon® Gold 6134
Memory 135 GB
OS Platform linux
OS Distro Ubuntu
OS Release 22.04.3 LTS
Node.js v16.17.1
@xeokit/xeokit-convert 1.1.15-beta-1
@xeokit/xeokit-sdk 2.5.2-beta-23
Full System Configuration >>

LAS Conversion Pipeline Setup

We ran our converter tools on each LAS file in our test collection using the CLI commands shown below. For each LAS file, we substitute "model" with the name of that file.


convert2xkt

The convert2xkt tool converts various model file formats into XKT format, which we can view in the browser with xeokit. We use it to convert LAS files into XKT files, as shown in the command below.

XKT is xeokit's web-friendly native binary model format, designed to load quickly into its web viewer. Note that convert2xkt is NodeJS-based CLI tool that often needs us to allocate it some extra memory, as we're doing here.

node --max-old-space-size=14000 convert2xkt -c convert2xkt.conf.json -s model.las -o model.xkt

xeokit-sdk

Finally, we visualize our XKT file in the browser using xeokit's web viewer. In JavaScript, we simply create a Viewer, add an XKTLoaderPlugin, and then load our XKT file.


convert2xkt Arguments

The table below lists the arguments we're providing to convert2xkt to convert each LAS file.

-c convert2xkt.conf.json Path to convert2xkt configs file.
-s Path to the input LAS/LAZ file to convert.
-o Path to the XKT file to create as output.

convert2xkt Configs

As shown from the provided arguments, we pass configurations to convert2xkt through a JSON configuration file named convert2xkt.conf.json. The configuration file's content is displayed below.

In the configuration file, the "sourceConfigs" object contains the "las" and "laz" objects, which contain the configurations used by convert2xkt in our LAS/LAZ conversion tests.