Entwine Point Tile

[connormanning]

What is this

This PR is a comprehensive overhaul of Entwine to target the Entwine Point Tile format - a very simple static specification for point cloud octree serialization. While Entwine's file format has previously been a black-box format not intended for direct usage (see #79) except via abstraction by Greyhound, the Entwine Point Tile (EPT) format is intended for direct usage.

The documentation has been updated for the lack of Greyhound in the default workflow - Greyhound will become more of a server-side processing utility rather than a necessary part of the normal Entwine workflow.

Links:

• Getting started
• Configuration docs
• File format description/discussion repo
• Potree EPT demo (click the EU flags for data that's been replicated to the eu-central-1 region)
• Potree EPT code
• New 3D Tiles instructions

Next steps

This week, new versions of Entwine and Greyhound (Entwine 1.3) will be released, which will be the final releases based on the black-box storage format. Then this will be merged to master, where it will simmer for a little while for bug fixes and format discussion, before being released as Entwine 2.0. Entwine 1.3 and the corresponding Greyhound release will still receive maintenance updates as necessary.

There are still a few TODOs: Greyhound updates, appending dimensions, vagueness in certain aspects of the metadata, more compression types, CI test updates, etc. However I think the majority of existing use-cases are covered with the EPT branch at this point. A real specification will also be needed, as opposed to the current informal developer-level description.

For now, you can try the new code out with the docker container connormanning/entwine:ept. Try docker run -it connormanning/entwine:ept build help or browse the links above to get started.