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HOWTO: Save and Load the pointcloud

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Rabit edited this page Sep 21, 2021 · 4 revisions

Here we will explain how to save and load your captured pointcloud.

Save pointclouds

Ok, you just captured the pointcloud and want to save it. The pointclouds uses PCD binary (part of PCL - point cloud library tools) format. It is suitable to interact with different software and easily convert the formats. H3DS uses compression for PCD files by default, which you can disable in Settings.

  1. Open the list of the captured pointclouds: List of not active point clouds
  2. Select the pointclouds you want to save (only the selected pointclouds will be saved): List with selected point cloud
  3. Tap on the "floppy disc" icon to start the saving process: Tap on save pointclouds button
  4. Now the system ask you about where to save your visible pointclouds: Select directory to save dialog
  5. Navigate to the required directory and click "Select" button Choose directory to save dialog
  6. Done - now your selected pointclouds are saved in the directory you selected

Load pointcloud

Now the opposite operation - you want to open the saved pointcloud.

  1. Tap on the "opened directory" icon Tap on load pointclouds button
  2. System will show the select file screen - you need to navigate and select the file Select directory to load dialog
  3. Open the list of the captured pointclouds: List of not active point clouds
  4. Select the pointcloud you just opened: List with selected point cloud
  5. Done - now you can see your captured pointcloud

Export the scene

In v0.4.0 we added support to export the 3d scene. It stores the current visible meshes & camera position into the binary glTF 2.0 glb format (using Draco compression by default, but could be disabled in settings).

WARNING: this format is only for export and couldn't be imported right now. Also be careful - it could loss the data about the captured pointcloud (for example if you will set some custom compression settings), so be careful.

How to use it:

  1. Open/Capture your pointclouds and select the ones you want to save: Two selected pointclouds
  2. Click on the glTF2 export button Exporting scene to glTF 2.0 format
  3. Select directory, choose some name for the glb file and click Save button Select directory & glb file name
  4. It will take some time to export & compress the scene (depends on the number of pointclouds & compression settings).
  5. Done - your glb file is ready.

Also please check Save.glTF2 settings section - you can disable compression: some software still don't support Draco glTF 2 extension. Latest version (since ~v2.92) of Blender already can load Draco-compressed gltf2, so no worries about that.

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