Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

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pipingdesigner
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Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by pipingdesigner »

For smaller projects I attach point clouds as XREFs to AutoCAD Plant 3D models and of course realtime rotating and even cropping is agonizingly slow most of the time.

Is the process of loading point clouds on the screen most dependant on the CPU and is this multi-threaded (i.e., will more cores load the point cloud faster)? I understand that CAD is mostly single-threaded. I use a fairly recent 4-core i7 with 16GB RAM, a fast M.2 SSD and a P620 Quadro graphics card.

I suppose using PointSense Plant to auto-model at least part of the surroundings would help but I don't think it models much more than piping and the cost is prohibitive in any case.

Is the solution to this just better point cloud management techniques (splitting into smaller, more manageable cloud sizes and then turning them on and off constantly) or simply waiting years until hardware speed catches up?
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Re: Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by badam »

Most of the time it is not hardware issues rather then softwares are far behind, the point cloud industry... For example autodesk point cloud engine is just a garbage. Your best bet is to decimate the cloud as much as you can still recognise the features and split/hide them accordingly. There are better point cloud engines but the native cad softwares i just way behind like, autodesk (revit, autocad,recap, etc), Archicad,

as an autocad replacement there is a better autocad (dwg compatible solution) bricscad, which has far better point cloud engine (with panorama photos, and automatic extractions.)

Of course in your hardware the biggest bottleneck i suppose is the amount of ram. I'd at least throw at it 32GB of ram to any CAD like workflow or more if possible especially if you work with point clouds.
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Re: Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by Leandre Robitaille »

Issue here is autocad.
Main reason is that you have to many lines in your drawing. Autocad is super fast in 2d wideframe but at soon as you insert a pointcloud it switches to conceptual and autocad cant handle lines in 3D, you might be working with a drawing that contains to many lines. I often work with the pointcloud in a blank drawing first then import what I sketch in the final autocad.


Second reason, you need to decimate the data.

I'll just copy pasta a huge chunk of text I wrotte the other day in another post; (in short if you pointcloud has 450million points it is going to be heavy for nothing since autocad only loads 25mil points)

"Autocad has a maximum of 25 000 000 points per file (.RCP or .RCS)
For a RCP the points of each .rcs files( for each scans) in that support folder will count in the total of points for that .rcp.
Single unified RCS file has a max of 25 000 000 but it applies to 1 file only, doesnt matter if you have many inserted in autocad. Each files RCS or RCP inserted in autocad will have a maximum of 25M points. Now you need to work around that in order to maximize your autocad renderings.
FYI, In autocad you can see the amount of points when viewing the file in the XREF command.
If you want more points to load in autocad, you will need to create multiple .rcs (unified exports) of less than 25 000 000 points each, hence you would need to crop your project, I use regions in recap for that and roughly eyeball it. I think there is a way to do Tilling in cloudcompare that would be more automated.
For cloudcompare, you could do 1 big unified rcs file, import that .rcs in recap, export a e57 from that unified .rcs than split it in many e57 in cloudcompare using the tilling tools. Import those splitted .e57 in recap, take all the separated rcs from the support folder and import that in autocad. Maybe someone else knows more about tilling here that could help you if that is what you would like to do. I might even look more into it myself if you need me to"


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Re: Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by badam »

for automatic tiling i'd use pdal instead of cloudcompare, however it can be done in either software, but the easiest and maybe the best is just simply decimate the cloud, as long as you can see the features clearly in sections.
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Re: Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by sim.herrod »

We use AutoCAD with Cloudworx.

Never had a problem with massive point clouds.
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Re: Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by Mike Annear »

Rhino 3D = ~ 250,000,000 points unplugged
"Unlimited" pointclouds if you add the Veesus Point Clouds for Rhino plug-in.
I stopped using AutoCad for 3D 20 years ago, horrible software.
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Re: Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by smacl »

Rather ambiguous as to what is a huge or massive point cloud these days. Billions of points on the desktop is not unusual, 2 billion and 4 billion (2^31 and 2^32) are common points of failure for many systems. Hundreds of millions of points are becoming the norm
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SCC Point Cloud module
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Re: Managing Huge Point Clouds in CAD Software

Post by gord »

pipingdesigner wrote: Sun Nov 28, 2021 9:23 am ...
I suppose using PointSense Plant to auto-model at least part of the surroundings would help but I don't think it models much more than piping and the cost is prohibitive in any case.
...

Im a software dev working on automated extraction of pipes / Ibeams from point cloud data ..
which seems a fairly laborious task to model by hand, costly even if you outsource it.

Couple Qns :
- What is a fair price point for such software ?
- Do we have any really good examples of publicly available point clouds, to test and compare results ?
[ anyone wants to donate a gnarly scan of plant piping or bridge steel-work ? ]
gord anderson
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