CloudCompare forum

Good Day To All !
I was hoping someone could PLEASE! share a bit of guidance with me? This is really long, but as I have no clue what I am doing, I have no idea on where I am going wrong? I am new to cloudcompare and GIS, I had one class in GIS a while back, so I only know what is possible, and most of the file formats. I mainly play with Sketchup and Autocad 12 Dos through Architectural 2017. I am attempting to use cloudcompare as the method to manipulate data for use, as this is the only thing I have found that can “do the trick”, I cant afford Arc GIS or other paid programs. (I have viewed lots of cloudcompare youtube videos to get a basic understanding on what I need to “do”. But I can not seem to get a point cloud into cloudcompare for the life of me! I spent my entire Christmas, New Years, Weekends and time after work for the past month trying over and over again to get things to work! Probably easily exceeding 90 hours now.

Here is what I have been attempting so maybe you can let me know to STOP trying, as this is starting to stress life in general a bit now! “As am trying things that will NEVER work”. So I can give up and stop beating my head against the wall! First I will share what I am trying to do, then how I tried to do it.

I am trying to make good 3D stepped terrain models for all the US Virgin Islands, First St Croix then St Thomas and then St John’s to start. St Croix is about 3 miles wide, 8 miles long and about 1,100 feet in elevation. I mainly want to create from “sea level” to top of highest land elevation. (Adding adjacent ocean shore topos “depths” would be cool, but a bit too difficult as I am just learning, so I figured just try the land first).

I “guestimated” to attempt the following… I think 1,100 ft is about 334 Meters?, Final process of ½ Meter steps would yield about 670 steps, I am guessing a point cloud density of a point every .1 meter would give me a distribution of “about 5 points per step? I do not know if that is accurate enough to get good outputs to use? TOTALLY guessing in the dark here! But the data I gathered below is so large as mentioned in the next paragraph, I have to reduce the size somehow so it will not crash my “Alienware r17, 64-bit, CPU i7-7820HK, 2.90GHz laptop” “every” time I try to open / reduce size to make it usable.

I looked “everywhere” and found “things” at the USGS and NOAA to look for info to make a 3D shape from. First I downloaded “Something” from USGS about 5 Gigabites of “stuff” TWF/Tif files, I have NO clue what to do with those? Next from USGS I downloaded a 1 GB, 217,000,000 point cloud. The file search and organization system is not real clear, so it might be ALL the local Islands and Puerto Rico combined? So zoom in to just St Croix and erase the rest might be really rough data? After about 40-50 attempts I can get this to “load” . It will “show map”, If I do any type of task, it usually crashes, I do all the previous steps all over again and after a day or two I can get it opened and save to a lower file size…. A .bin, a .shp, a .dxf, a .ply and a .shp. They are all corrupted and I can not open these smaller files in cloudcompare? I have been redoing All the above processes over and over and over again. Always yielding the same results… Crash. So to keep from going craze I figured I better stop here and get some guidance from someone who knows what they are doing.

Thanks for any help or direction you can provide
Matthew Eilerman
ecoarcdesignpro@yahoo.com

Hi,

Well, a cloud of 217M. points is not that big, it shouldn't crash a good computer like yours. Which version of CloudCompare are you using? And which graphic card do you have?

Ideally, I'd like to try this on my side. Can you share the file with me? (admin [at] cloudcompare.org - you can send beig files with a service such as WeTransfer). Or maybe provide me with the link to this dataset is available online?

Best

Daniel

I put it up on Dropbox in a Share folder. What would the correct email address I should attach to give you access?
Thanks Matthew (Mattee) Eilerman.

admin [at] cloudcompare.org

(replace [at] by @ and remove the spaces ;)

Thanks for the data.

On my side, with the latest version (2.12.alpha) I was able to load the file without any issue: To load the full data (points and LAS fields), you'll need about 15Gb of free memory (in addition to what is already used by Windows, etc.). Then the optional LoD structure will use 2 or 3 Gb.

To load this file on your side, you can try to load only one LAS field ('Intensity' for instance). This will reduce the necessary memory to 3Gb!

Thanks Daniel! I think I had too many "things" checked, that might be what kept crashing things. When I only checked the box you advised, it opened correctly for the first time. Unfortunately this is just one piece of a 50 or 60 piece puzzle. So I will continue to look around for the entire Island, even though I do not know if it exists, I haven't had much luck over the past month, but I'll keep looking, there must be one somewhere. Thanks again, for the great advice!
Matthew Mattee Eilerman