etiles

A Rust library and CLI tool for processing 3D Tiles data.

Features:

• Converts point clouds to 3D Tiles 1.1 using octree spatial indexing
• Supports LAS, LAZ, E57, XYZ, and XYZ+Zstandard input formats
• Reprojects from any EPSG coordinate system to ECEF (EPSG:4978) using PROJ
• Encodes RGB colors from input point clouds into GLB tiles
• Outputs implicit tiling subtrees for efficient streaming

Early stage of development. Developed at the TUM Chair of Geoinformatics. Contributions welcome.

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etiles-cli

A command-line tool for converting point clouds to 3D Tiles.

Installation

Download pre-built executables for your platform from the release page.

On macOS, you need to remove the quarantine attribute after downloading:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./etiles-cli

Docker:

docker pull ghcr.io/tum-gis/etiles-cli

From source:

cargo install etiles-cli@0.0.2-alpha.1 # replace with the latest version

Usage

etiles-cli convert-point-cloud \
  --input-path /path/to/pointcloud.las \
  --output-path /path/to/output.tar \
  --source-crs 25832

For a full list of options:

etiles-cli convert-point-cloud --help

Convert an entire directory of point cloud files:

etiles-cli convert-point-cloud \
  --input-path /path/to/point_clouds/ \
  --output-path /path/to/output.tar \
  --source-crs 25832

Docker:

docker run --rm \
  -v /path/to/data:/data \
  ghcr.io/tum-gis/etiles-cli \
  convert-point-cloud \
  --input-path /data/pointcloud.las \
  --output-path /data/output.tar \
  --source-crs 25832

Options

Option	Default	Description
--input-path	—	Path to a point cloud file or directory
--output-path	—	Output .tar archive path
--source-crs	—	EPSG code of the input coordinate system
--maximum-points-per-octant	100000	Maximum points per octree node
--no-shuffle	—	Disable random shuffling of points before conversion
--seed	1	Seed for reproducible shuffling

Supported input formats

Format	Extension
LAS	.las
LAZ	.laz
E57	.e57
XYZ	.xyz
XYZ + Zstandard	.xyz.zst

Output format

Both the CLI and library produce a TAR archive containing:

• tileset.json — root 3D Tiles 1.1 document with implicit tiling metadata
• content/content_{level}_{x}_{y}_{z}.glb — binary glTF tiles with point positions and colors
• subtrees/{level}.{x}.{y}.{z}.subtree — implicit tiling subtree availability metadata

The single-file archive simplifies transfer and can be extracted on the target machine.

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etiles (library)

A Rust library for integrating 3D Tiles generation into your own application.

Installation

[dependencies]
etiles = "0.0.2-alpha.1" # replace with the latest version

License

Licensed under either of MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option.