Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by smacl »

I can send you out a 30 day demo license to SCC which could take the in the PTS and spit it out as a E57, LAS or LAZ. We also have tools to ditch very close points on import which can dramatically reduce the size of terrestrial scans where there are a massive number of redundant points very close to the setup position. In addition we support numerous automated tiling methods that will break your point cloud into a number of smaller and more manageable files.

As per my previous post, 2 billion and 4 billion points are magic numbers for software falling over as they correspond to 2^31 and 2^32 which is the default size of integers in many programming environments.
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by max72 »

Cloud compare has a very powerful command line.
You can filter, resample, cut, and many other things form command line using much less resources.
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by Mortum »

max72 wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 12:21 pm Cloud compare has a very powerful command line.
You can filter, resample, cut, and many other things form command line using much less resources.
Massimo
Well, CC died trying to work with the pointcloud :P (even with 64Gb RAM)
smacl wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:59 am I can send you out a 30 day demo license to SCC which could take the in the PTS and spit it out as a E57, LAS or LAZ. We also have tools to ditch very close points on import which can dramatically reduce the size of terrestrial scans where there are a massive number of redundant points very close to the setup position. In addition we support numerous automated tiling methods that will break your point cloud into a number of smaller and more manageable files.

As per my previous post, 2 billion and 4 billion points are magic numbers for software falling over as they correspond to 2^31 and 2^32 which is the default size of integers in many programming environments.
Thanks for the offer Shane, really appreciated!! and yeah i've read that most software don't like 1 billion+ points. (This file had 3.4 Billion points)
unfortunately the deadline for me to proof it could be done was yesterday evening.. so this morning the project manager rejected the cloud (which was made by a thirth party) and I got pulled from this case.

I will pick this file up again in downtime, but for now it has to go into the freezer. :(
Sincerely, Robin van der Molen

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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by smacl »

Sorry that the time ran out on you Robin, let me know if you hit this problem again in the future. Point clouds just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and where a couple of billion points used to be big once, it is pretty normal these days, particularly with dense clouds taken from photogrammetry, mobile mapping and some of the newer scanners. Planning and refining streamlined workflows for processing, storage and transfer seem to have become an ever increasing part of our work.
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by Mortum »

smacl wrote: Wed Feb 06, 2019 9:13 am Sorry that the time ran out on you Robin, let me know if you hit this problem again in the future. Point clouds just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and where a couple of billion points used to be big once, it is pretty normal these days, particularly with dense clouds taken from photogrammetry, mobile mapping and some of the newer scanners. Planning and refining streamlined workflows for processing, storage and transfer seem to have become an ever increasing part of our work.
Thanks for the info Shane,

Right now I am looking to improve our workflow for thirt party scan files (Mostly handed over as a .rcp file with support folder)

I get the best succes when i export from recap to .pts (.e57 export in recap crashes often/ is unreliable) and then import directly to GDX.

But this also was kind of a freak accident because normally it would work without a problem..

In this case GDX crashes during import, it also doesnt understand the ASCII format of this particular scan but I clicked the ignore function on the RGB & scalar values (while a other file from the same customer loaded without a problem/error message)

I tried to load it in cloud compare, but it freezes completely as well when the scan was loaded, so that didnt give any succes as well.

To be continued..
Sincerely, Robin van der Molen

Gear and Software:
Ye olde: Faro Photon 120
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by lastools »

Hello from @LAStools,

you could try the free and open source txt2las from LAStools which can convert PTS to LAS or LAZ. In case you run into issues you could chime in on this discussion here where we are trying to turn a 315 GB (approximately 4.8 Billion points) .pts file to .las file.

Unfortunately the pointzip.exe and pointunzip.exe tools do not support such large files at the moments as they were created before the LAS 1.4 specification was ratified.

Regards,

Martin @rapidlasso
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by lastools »

Hello from @LAStools,

the conversion issue was solved. If you have a huge PTS file without RGB you can run the free and open source txt2las from LAStools as follows:

Code: Select all

txt2las -i huge.pts -ipts -parse xyzi -set_scale 0.001 0.001 0.001 -o tiny.laz
txt2las -i huge.pts -ipts -parse xyzi -set_scale 0.001 0.001 0.001 -o small.las
if you have a huge PTS file with RGB you can run

Code: Select all

txt2las -i huge.pts -ipts -parse xyziRGB -set_scale 0.001 0.001 0.001 -o tiny.laz
txt2las -i huge.pts -ipts -parse xyziRGB -set_scale 0.001 0.001 0.001 -o small.las
Clayton successfully turned his 315 GB PTS file containing 6,379,507,497 points in ASCII format without RGB into 118 GB binary LAS file. After running LASzip on 118 GB LAS file it went down to a 13.4 GB LAZ file and apparently the Recap software he intends to import this point cloud into does support LAZ. Going from a 315 GB PTS file to a 13.4 GB LAZ file is a reduction in size by a factor of more than 23. Are there any Leica Cyclone or Geomagic developers on this list? Maybe adding LAZ to the list of supported Cyclone and/or Geomagic output formats might be worthwhile to consider.

Thanks for working with me through that, Clayton.

Martin @rapidlasso
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by 3DSean »

You shouldn't have an issue with a file that size in DX, the computer is well spec'd for it.

For point clouds, we keep the data in a temp cache folder on the HDD (meshes are loaded in RAM). You can change where that cache location is by going to Menu-->File-->Preferences

You'll also want to probably drop the undo depth down so that it's not caching multiple versions of the same file for the undo operation to run while you're in there.

If you're still having an issue, try to import the file with the ASCII converter which is usually a more robust solution when input errors are being experienced. What other export options do you have access to?
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by SAttaya »

1: what version of designX - idle curiosity.
----------------------
2: maybe divide & conquer will help ?

split .pts into multiple pieces (2 to start with)

if both come in, you're good.
if not, one works and other doesn't, split the one that doesn't work, and so on...
import one, save
in same project, import other one
if fails, new project and import 2nd one that failed
if works, save
if not do the split thing above.

You might have to put a header with number of lines,
alternatively, use the ASCII import and tell it to skip
the first line for the first 1/2 and 2nd (and succeeding) won't have line counts.

split it with something like "notepad++" or one of the unix-like utilities (tail, etc)
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Re: Geomagic Design X - Big .pts file (127gb) not importing

Post by NOVAMECH »

Don't use ReCap - simple - Problem Solved
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