CloudCompare forum

Hi,

I'm new to CC, so I apologize if the answer is obvious.

I'd like to import two point clouds that represent different portions of the same object I am trying to make a 3D model of (an iceberg).

The problem is that the PCs of these two things (surface area and the underwater shape) were obtained months apart, so their orientation is different.

To resolve this problem, I would like to rotate the surface area point cloud to align to the the shape of the underwater portion. Then I want to merge them as a single PC. I suppose that there must be a way to do this using both the point clouds together in CC. Can I then save the new coordinates of the rotated segment to a .csv or .txt file, too?

Thanks!

Yes, it should be possible:
- first take a look at http://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/in ... gistration to understand your options
- then you'll probably want to use the 'Translate/Rotate' tool to roughly (and manually) register the two scans (http://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/in ... ation_Tool).
- and eventually use the ICP registration to find a better fit (http://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/in ... ?title=ICP). However make sure to use a realistic "overlap" parameter (i.e. the percentage of points of the aligned points that are effectively in common with the reference cloud).

Another option if you have enough clearly recognizable common points then it may be more direct to use the Align tool (http://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/in ... itle=Align). You can do both operations above at the same time.