  LiDAR segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving perception. Recent
trends favor point- or voxel-based methods as they often yield better
performance than the traditional range view representation. In this work, we
unveil several key factors in building powerful range view models. We observe
that the "many-to-one" mapping, semantic incoherence, and shape deformation are
possible impediments against effective learning from range view projections. We
present RangeFormer -- a full-cycle framework comprising novel designs across
network architecture, data augmentation, and post-processing -- that better
handles the learning and processing of LiDAR point clouds from the range view.
We further introduce a Scalable Training from Range view (STR) strategy that
trains on arbitrary low-resolution 2D range images, while still maintaining
satisfactory 3D segmentation accuracy. We show that, for the first time, a
range view method is able to surpass the point, voxel, and multi-view fusion
counterparts in the competing LiDAR semantic and panoptic segmentation
benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and ScribbleKITTI.
