Opening scans
Point clouds in LAS, LAZ, E57, PLY, PCD, PTX, PTS and text formats, and meshes in OBJ, PLY, OFF and STL. Drop files on the window and open several at once: each file is a layer that you can hide, show or close.
A whole scan project at once
Open a folder of scans, or the scan project file (.rcp) of a project: the scans that the file lists and that lie beside it are opened together. Dropping a folder or a project file on the window works too.
Large files
LAS and LAZ files open immediately from their header. An E57 file of 512 MiB or more first shows a sample spread through the file, when its layout allows that; other files of that size show the points read so far every few seconds. A strip above the scene shows the progress and the time left, with a button to cancel.
Detail where you look
For clouds of one million points or more the application automatically builds an index on disk, an octree. It supplies the detail for the current camera position, up to the point budget you set: at most ten million points. The points on screen stay while the camera moves; the detail of the new view takes their place once it has been read. The index is kept and used again when you open the file later.
Display
Four colour modes (stored colour, elevation, intensity and classification), eye-dome lighting and an adjustable point size. The classes that occur in the clouds can be shown or hidden one by one. A view cube and seven camera directions turn the view.
Section box
A box with six draggable faces limits what is shown, selected, meshed and searched for faces. This is how you cut a floor plan or a section out of a scan; the content of the box can be exported on its own or drawn as a 2D drawing. The box follows the X, Y and Z axes of the scan and cannot be rotated.
Measuring
Distance measures a line through two or more picked points: each segment, the total length, the horizontal length and the height difference. Area measures a closed polygon in its own plane, so a wall or a sloped roof gets its real area, and also gives the area seen from above and the perimeter. Points are picked from all points of the active scan, not only from those on screen.
Views, notes and BCF
A saved view keeps the camera, the section box, the colour mode and its annotations: a note on a picked point or an arrow between two points. All views of a scan export as one BCF 2.1 file, each with its notes, camera, clipping planes and a picture of the scene.
Station photos and walking
Scanner stations of E57, PCD and PTX scans are shown as markers in the scene. A station with photos is drawn as a ball: click it to stand in that station and look around. Walk through the scan with W, A, S and D, go down and up with Q and E, and faster with Shift.
Selecting and editing
Select every source point inside a rectangle, or pick one point and read its coordinates and attributes. Delete the selection, with undo for up to eight deletions, thin a cloud to an exact percentage of its points, or move and scale it. The source file is never changed: an export writes the edited result.
Exporting and merging
Export the whole cloud, the selection, everything but the selection, the content of the section box or every Nth point as LAS, LAZ, E57, PLY, XYZ, PTS or CSV. LAS and LAZ exports keep the original point records with their attributes. Visible LAS and LAZ scans can be merged into one file. Every export reads the full source, so points that are not on screen are written too.
Meshes
Terrain mesh builds a 2.5D surface from the lowest points of a grid. 3D surface also follows walls and overhangs; it leaves holes and is not watertight. Export mesh… saves any mesh, whether made here, opened from a file or downloaded from the 3D BAG, as OBJ, binary PLY or binary STL. Properties shows the vertices, the triangles, the open edges and the number of connected parts.
Section drawing
Section drawing makes a 2D drawing at scale 1:1 of what the section box cuts and saves it as DXF or DWG: a plan from the slab under the top face of the box, or a vertical section from the slab behind one of its four sides. The drawing holds the points of that slab from every visible scan, thinned to one point per 5 mm. Filled cut draws the walls, columns and floors that the slab goes through as filled regions with outlines and leaves door and window openings open. Preview shows these regions over the points before a file is saved.
Closed mesh
Closed mesh builds a surface without overlaps from every point inside the section box, or of the whole scan: closed wherever the scan has points or a gap narrower than the hole limit (0.25 m at the start), with door and window openings left open. Put the box around a room and choose Start; the block in Properties says beforehand how large the region is and about how many triangles it gives, and warns when that is more than a mesh may hold. Afterwards it gives the mean, the 95% and the largest distance between the points and the mesh, the open edges and the connected parts. A mesh holds at most four million vertices and eight million triangles and can be saved as OBJ, PLY or STL.
Detected faces
Detect faces finds, inside the section box or in the whole scan, the flat faces (floors, ceilings, walls and sloped planes) and the round columns and pipes. A flat face is one plane with its outline, in which a window is a hole and a door a notch; a column or pipe is one cylinder with its axis, radius and scanned length, without an outline. It is not a mesh of the surface. The list gives the type, the area and the residual of the points (RMS) of every face; a click highlights the face in the scene. Export faces… saves them as JSON with the parameters of every plane and cylinder, or as OBJ with a group per face.
3D BAG buildings
3D BAG buildings… in the File view downloads building models of the Netherlands from the public 3D BAG register for an area in RD New coordinates and shows them with a scan. One download covers at most 2 by 2 km and about 5,000 buildings and needs an internet connection. It is a built-in extension that can be switched off on the Extensions page.
Dutch and English
The interface follows the language of the system, Dutch or English, and can be changed in Settings. The messages in the status bar and most texts with a count in them are in English only. There are five colour themes.
