CloudCompare forum

Hi there,

I'm relatively new to CC and try to co-register point clouds (same scene, different years). Anyways, the probem I'm facing might be related to performance/memory limitations, since the original point clouds are fairly large (10-20 Mio points). However, something erratic seems involved as well, maybe one of you has experience with such?

Here's what happened a few days ago and just now again:

I load a large point cloud. I reduce it by segmentation & delete (cropping). I save it under a new name. I re-open it, crop it a bit more. But this time, saving freezes, means, CC does not even show the save dialog (hourglass instead). And now, if I kill CC and re-open the programm, it does not even save a tiny point cloud, that I load for test. Same behaviour: Hourglass.

What did I do for trouble shooting:

- Checking for running CC background processes in task manager --> find none
- Restart of my PC --> did not help
- Re-Install of CC --> did not help !!!

What did help the first time just seems waiting a few days!! This sounds pretty weird but at some point it worked again last week. Just until now, where I overstrained it again. The described happend with TLS point clouds as well with such created with Pix4D.

So my question: Does this sound familiar to someone? Does someone have an idea, on how I can get CC back to work faster? And possibly avoid such crashes?

Some details:

- Windows 8.1
- Acer Aspire laptop
- Intel Core i5 5200U
- RAM 16 GB
- NVDIA GeForce GTX 950M
- CloudCompare 2.9 beta (happened with 2.6 and 2.8 similar)

THANKS, Gerhard

Hi,

This is a weird bug indeed. Especially since a few tens of million points is definitely a 'large' cloud for CloudCompare (you'll more probably hit a wall over 200 or 300 million points with your configuration).

Do you have an antivirus that's messing with CC? (maybe considering that it's memory management is suspicious ;).

Other options are:
- to update the graphic card drivers
- to disable the fancy options in CloudCompare (like 'Try to load clouds on GPU for faster display' or 'Enable shader for faster display')

Thanks for your fast reply,Daniel, short update from my side:

Interesting your hint regarding antivirus. Indeed, when it happened for the first time last week, I observed temporarily 100% disk usage and quickly related "Windows Antimalware Executable" and the linked "MsMpEng.exe" service to it (right or wrong, don't know). Means, I'm just using Windows Defender.

Anyways, tried with disabled WD today (disabled via registry), no change (I shorten my description a bit. I always do restarts when I change something solid and run CCleaner to fix potential issues).

I also tried your recommendations regarding fancy graphics/display options: no change.

But then, I came accross something weird. From Pix4D I remembered, the software hates capitals in file names (means trouble). It just brought me onto the track, that my current issues might also be related to something weird with paths (too long? bad chars used?) or file names (numbers at start? etc.). So I tested a bit. (Generally I'm diciplined in naming, no special chars except underscore etc., just spaces in folder names sometimes.

So I simply dragged a tiny file (2000 pts), which I could open but not save to the desktop and tried again: It worked! And even reproducable. I moved it back to old location: did not work. Moved it to desktop: worked.

Similar with a large file. It started with date 170710_ etc and I changed it to starting with letters. Worked!

BUTTTTT: Even though this seemed the solution, even this got erratic and what was reproducable a couple of times stopped working after a while again. So I'm back to where I was.

At least, the fact that the "dragging a file onto the desktop" worked at least a bit ("waking up" CC), gives me some hope. However, all could still just be an "error with delay". Means, that some backround procedures (WDefender or memory or graphic card related) just need some time and user activity to build up towards a critical point and then … freeze.

BTW: Graphic card driver I just updated 3 weeks ago due to something else, so I did not do so now.

A little confused but will keep testing, thx, Gerhard

Just saw that I got 14 instances of Visual Studio C++ installed, from "2005 Redistributable" up to "2015 Redistributable". Could a conflict originate here? Not the expert for this, but would I break something, in case I would deinstall all and just freshly install Visual Studio 2017?

In case things don't work I have the tendency to clean up. Often good, sometimes fatal...

No I don't think the Visual Studio instances are the problem (I myself have all the versions of Visual that one can imagine ;).

You have a veeeeeeeeerrrry strange issue here ;). A third party program or driver is definitely messing with CloudCompare here.

Hello,

I have exactly the same problem. CC works for several days then nothing! Installed, re-installed but nothing changes ... and then after a week it's good.
Other software follow the same program like Photoscan or 3DReshaper ... A track compared to the fact that they are 3D software ??

Thanks again for your help.

That's weird, but it could be indeed related to the 3D display driver. Do you have a computer (laptop) with dual graphic cards? If yes, are you sure the real 3D graphic card is always used when starting these tools?

Hello,
Yes it's a laptop computer with a dell graphics card and an additional 4GB (nvidia). So I have to start with my original graphics card?
I have just reset all the PC graphics factory settings in the Nvidia control panel but nothing better than before

Thank you for your aviability

In the NVidia control panel, you can specify that you want to use the NVidia card with specific softwares (you should do it for CC).

You can force the use of the higher-end graphics card when a program is launched by opening the NVIDIA Control Panel -> 3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings -> Program Settings tab, choose CloudCompare from the 'Select a program to customize' pull menu (use Add button if it's not in the list to add the executable's path. Choose the desired GPU from the pull list Select the preferred graphics processor for this program. Close the NVidia Control Panel.