Extract section polyline from surface

[Andreij]

Hello,
first of all a big thanks to the developers of CloudCompare! The tool works very well and is easy to use even for a total beginner like myself.
I have a cloud which I obtained by scanning a rough surface with a laser. I cleaned it up a bit, created a surface mesh with Delaunay and Smoothed it a bit. The result look really good. What I would like to do now is to extract the data of a polyline resulting from the intersection with a section plane. I tried to follow this tutorial, but am unable to obtain the desired result. With "Slices" I simply obtain a part of my surface and not a single line. On the other hand I can't click on "Contour", I assume because my surface isn't closed but more like a topography. Is there a way to obtain the intersecting polyline?
Thanks in advance!

[daniel]

Hi,

in fact as with many tools of CC, extracting the contour with the Cross Section tool can only be done on point clouds. It's a bit silly but in your case you can sample (a lot of) points on the surface mesh, and then use the cross section tool on the resulting cloud.

Extracting the contour directly from the mesh would be easier and cleaner... but as CC is a point cloud tool, we didn't add this option :D

[Andreij]

Thanks a lot, I'll try to do that!