Point Cloud Data

[tom.mcnulty]

The majority of my work involves the registration, analysis, manipulation and tracing of point cloud data (PCD). Below is a list of problems I face with PCD in the Product Design Suite (PDS) and features of other software packages that I find useful and would like to see included in Autodesk products.

I have seen some improvements with the handling of PCD within the PDS in the last couple of years however it does not cater for all of my PCD needs and as a result my workflow is still very disjointed with a wide range of software packages including: Faro Scene, Bentely Pointools, Pointools 4 Rhino, Recap and Inventor. I would love to solely use Autodesk products but they don't cut it at the moment.

I use Faro Scene for registration; I am aware that Recap Pro for an additional £3k plus cost per year. If it included additional features such as point cloud selection and RGB editing (painting tools) then I may be able to justify this expenditure as it would remove my requirment for Bentley Pointools which is fantastic for this and for creating animations. The RGB editing is a necessity for me as I often have to refine data prior to creating animations and simply deleting out people and objects just leaves big holes. 

One thing Recap does very well is handle the PCD. The scans can be navigated through with ease, rotating views etc is very smooth. Once the same scans are opened in Inventor things start to slow down. I have a 24gb computer with a decent graphics card which runs PCD in other packages seemlessly however once more than two or three scans are imported into Inventor it really struggles with rotating the data. Also taking sections of the data is quite a laborious process; I find Pointools 4 Rhino much more user friendly as it handles the PCD well and section lines can be dragged through the data. The addition of section lines in Inventor would be fantastic.