compare 2 point clouds

[daniel]

I think there's a big misunderstanding here (maybe from my part ;):
- There's no 'rough' plane in CC. There's a method to estimate roughness that fit (very small) planes to compute a local estimation of roughness for each point. You don't have access to those planes (anyway there's as many planes as points)
- The 'mean' plane (Tools > Fit > Plane) is only fitted on the points (without any consideration to the scalar values). And you should see it in the DB tree (left window).

So I believe we speak of different things...

[freemountain]

So, I now have that plane through the middle of all points... is there a way to lower it to make it run through the lowest of my 'rough' plane so that all points are above the new and flat plane? And then I would love to measure the distances from each point to the plane, just like the histogram does, but with figures given.

[daniel]

There's two ways to translate a plane (or any other primitive):
- either manually with the Graphical Transformation tool (use only the right mouse button so as to only apply translation and no rotation)
- or with the 'Edit > Apply transformation' tool you may achieve a more accurate result (but you'll have to do a few maths: take the plane's normal, multiply its coordinates by the distance you want to shift the plane of. Then use this vector as translation in the 'Apply transformation' tool - mind the normal orientation).

Eventually, you can select the cloud and the plane and compute 'Cloud/Mesh distances' (see "Tools > Distance"). You'll get the distances from all points to the plane (you can export the cloud with the associated scalar field as an ASCII file to read it in Excel or Matlab afterwards).