A client of RhinoCentre asked several questions about using Rhino 6 for point clouds.
As I don’t have recent experience with large point clouds, I’d like to know whether you can tell us more.
1- Is there a maximum size for the pointcloud to be imported or a maximum file size? My answer would be that it depends on the hardware configurations. Since Rhino 5-64 bit, there’s less problems with large size. What’s your idea?
2- Which point cloud size is workable in Rhino? Over here I exploded a point cloud containing 377830 points and that works fine with my Quadro M4000M graphics card. However, when I duplicate these points, the display speed becomes sluggish. What are your experiences?
3- Has Rhino 6 improved, compared to V5, when it comes to working with point clouds?
4- Which plugins are available to manipulate point clouds and mesh them? I know that there are some Grasshopper solutions and my prospect mentioned http://veesus.com/veesus-arena4d-rhino/
I am happy to hear more from you.
Thank you in advance.
Rhino 6 can display point clouds much faster than V5 given that you have decent graphics hardware. Other than that we haven’t made changes in point cloud processing commands that I know of.
This depends on your graphics card capabilities
377830 is a relatively small number of points for a point cloud. You should be able to work with clouds that have point counts in the millions. Exploding point clouds makes individual point objects which is much heavier resource wise and is why you are seeing a lag in Rhino.
Yes, I am totally aware that separate points consume much more resources that point clouds. That was what I saw again this morning when I played with them.
Nice to read that the display speed has improved in V6 when it comes to displaying point clouds.
Now it is interesting to read about plugins…anyone about that?
My general workflow is to segment the point cloud in Cloud Compare, typically to several resolutions and some high density areas of interest. Using Volvox i import the e57s and bake them into respective files to use in Rhino Worksessions. The Volvox component Cloud | Planes will generate sections of the cloud to work with. I stay away from any sort of meshing.