CloudCompare forum

Hello,
I have this huge .las file with 23,827,557 points and I'm working in a process to show it in an online viewer. I'm trying to convert the point cloud into a mesh which CloudConverter does pretty good but the resulting mesh is hanging from the point cloud. I tryed to save only the mesh layer but it seems that it needs the point cloud, is that true or is there a way to save only the mesh?

Now, since the resulting point cloud + mesh is really huge I'd like to know how to split it into more manageable files. Do I have to make it manually or is there a process I can rely on?

Thank you,

Iker

Be reassured, 23M. is not that big (for a cloud ;) ).

When you generate a mesh (I guess you are using the 2.5D Delaunay method?), you should be able to select the mesh entity (underneath the cloud in the DB tree) and then export it as any mesh format (OBJ / PLY / STL, etc.). The vertices (your original points) will be exported correctly. And if you reload the file it will become an independent mesh.

You can also 'clone' the mesh entity so as to create a separate / independent version.

And last but not least, to reduce / simplify the mesh you have several options:

• reduce the cloud first (with the 'Subsample' tool)
• reduce the mesh afterwards (with Meshlab for instance - Meshlab is also a better meshing tool than CC by the way ;)
• and you could also try to use the PoissonRecon plugin (it's a little bit harder to use but gives much smoother results and you can control the reconstruction quality which will give change the number of generated triangles).

Hi Daniel,
Thank you very much for the answer.
It helped me a lot.