CloudCompare forum

First of all, I am new to Point Clouds in general so please bear with me.
I have a 2.5 billion point PTS file. I get it about 22% open in Cloud Compare before I get an error message and it shuts down - I have read in a few other threads that the maximum number of points CC can load Is 2 billion (not sure if this is true). Once I have loaded it, I intend to wipe out the "ground points" using CSF and hopefully I can merge the "off-ground points."

MY QUESTION:
Is there a way to either break down the file or only load parts at a time?

In addition, there are a few oddities that may or may not affect my inability to open this file:

1. When I open CC I get a "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive E:" error message with the options to click "cancel, try again, or continue." If I choose "cancel" or "continue" CC opens with no other issues.
2. When I open my file I get an opening/dialogue box that I have not seen in any of the tutorials I have watched (maybe I haven't watched any that open PTS/Ascii files?). Sorry if this doesn't make much sense or I am going into too much detail!
This dialogue box says "Here are the first lines of this file. Choose each column attribution (one cloud at a time):
I can choose to skip any number of lines in another part of the box and there is a part that says "Max number of points per cloud" and it is set to 2000.00 Million (I can decrease but cannot increase this number). Does anyone know if there is a tutorial or explanation to this box?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Wow, you'll need a lot of memory to load and process 2.5 billion points (in one or multiple clouds).

But you are right, CC can't load that many points in a single cloud. You'll have to break it down... and exactly with the option you see at the bottom of the ASCII/TEXT file loading dialog ("Max number of points per cloud"). And by the way, yes this dialog is standard.

You should chunk your cloud by pieces of 500 million at most. But anyway, you'll still need a lot of memory. And I doubt you'll be able to use the CSF plugin on so many points (it's not ultra fast, and it also requires even more memory to work). So you should definitely work on the smaller parts. And in this case, make them much smaller.