CloudCompare forum

I am new to this program and have come to a roadblock.
I do 3d imaging of shore erosion via drone. I create point clouds of shorelines about a year apart.
I am able to load 2 point clouds into CC, register them, and (after a lot of practice) align them and do a C2C distance.
My question is how can i save the resulting point cloud in a format that any 3d viewing program will open? The two i don't need to be able to view the 2 layers separately. I would be happy with the result being one new cloud that can be saved.

You can convert the fake colors (distances) to RGB colors (it will help). Use 'Edit > Scalar fields > Convert to RGB'.

Then you can export the cloud as a more standard format, such as E57 of PLY?

Not really doing what i want.
I tried merging the 2 clouds and saving that....but no matter what format i used nothing would open it. .lax .las .obj .....from File/Save

With which software are you trying to load the cloud?

Meshlab, meshmixer, Regard 3D, and even the Windows 10 3D viewer.
Here's what I want to do.
I have done drone 3d imaging of a lake shoreline that's suffering severe erosion. I have 2 point clouds created a year apart. I want to use CC to show the amount of erosion between the 2 years.
So I am looking to save and share the resulting distance measurement output....even with the planar colors.

Also, how can I save the output of the cloud to cloud measurement for future use. I have been doing registering, point to point alignment and measuring every time I start the program.
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here.

Thanks

The softwares you cite are (almost) all for meshes only. Only Meshlab can load point clouds (in which case you should export them from CC as ASCII/text files or maybe PLY).

And exporting to ASCII is probably the best way to answer your 2nd need as you'll get the points, color and/or scalar fields in the same file, easily readable with Excel, Matlab, etc.