CloudCompare forum

For an object like that I’d say your mesh actually looks pretty good. Something like that is going to be difficult to get a clean mesh from. In addition to good normals you’ll also need an extremely dense point cloud that captures the entire surface with no gaps, which is hard to get with structures...

Of all the 3D applications I’ve used the UI I like the best is having a modifier that is held down to activate navigation mode (tumble, pan, dolly, zoom, etc). That frees up all the mouse buttons for usage by tools when the modifier isn’t active. ALT is a pretty popular choice for the modifier key, ...

Sounds like it's impossible to use this type of scanner on this type of object and get good normals out of it. I wouldn't say impossible, just challenging ;-) For a mobile scanner like that you would probably also need to consider the scanner's trajectory in order to make sure the orientation of th...

Where did the point cloud come from and how are you generating the normals? Hopefully it's from a tripod scanner and you have it as structured scans, as that's probably your only hope for getting good enough normals for something like this. Like, daniel said this kind of structures is going to be re...

Do you mean Kriging?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging

It's been around since the 60s so I'm not sure I'd call it new at this point ;-)

It’s not a point cloud specific format, but I’m assuming the OP is referring to the Alembic file format:

https://www.alembic.io/

Source code for the library here:

https://github.com/alembic/alembic

It's not CloudCompare specific but this covers the basics: http://learnwebgl.brown37.net/transformations2/transformations_matrices.html If you don't want to dig in to the math, you can just think of a 4x4 matrix as a convenient way to store a rigid transform (translate, rotate, and scale). That tran...

Another thing you may want to take a look at is the spatial distribution of the points you're using for registration. If you're working with raw undecimated tripod lidar scans then you have many more points per unit area on surfaces that are close to the scanner than you have on points that are far ...

The name of the vertex attribute added by the --density flag is 'value'.

You're using the `--density` flag correctly. When you do so it adds a vertex attribute named `value`. Just make sure you select that attribute as a scalar field, see below, when you import the resulting ply in to CloudCompare.