How to rotate a Point Cloud?

[Niklas]

Hey everyone,

im absolutely new to CloudCompare and have not worked that much with pointclouds in general, so please bear with me :)

For a task in uni i am working with a pointcloud of the outside of a church. For starters i have to rotate the cloud so the churches walls and my coordinate systems axis are parallel. Now i wanted to transform the whole pointcloud with matlab, but i can't really work with the .bin file given to me, since it doesn't make much sense when opened with notepad++. Are there any programs which are recommendable to look into a pointcloud file of that type?
Further, i've read here that you can transform clouds within CloudCompare via Edit-> Apply transformation, if you have the neccessary transformation matrix. The button is greyed out in my program though. Why might that be?

If anything is unclear about my questions please ask! Thanks to everyone in advance :)

Niklas

[daniel]

1) If the 'bin' file you have has been generated by CloudCompare, then you can re-open it, and save it as an ASCII file (= text file). Simply select the cloud, then use 'File > Save as' and choose the ASCII export format. This will create a text file that is much easier to read with Matlab (or even Excel ;).

2) You can rotate your cloud in a lof of ways with CloudCompare (and even register it with ground control points, level the ground, etc.). Anyway one of these methods is indeed the 'Apply transformation' tool. To enable it, you just have to select a cloud first ;)

For more pointers, see http://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/in ... gistration