CloudCompare forum

Hi,

I might be wrong, but I don't know of a feature to display the point cloud partially. Sometimes, if I work with heavy point clouds (900mil points +) it is hard to work with in the viewport for obvious reasons.

It would be incredibly useful to have a feature where we can view every 10th point for example. so 900mil ptc would be viewed as 90mil ptc, so we can move around faster to the areas we need.
It wouldn't be a problem, if this result was reached by a process, creating new clone of the original ptc, with only 90m points. (1/10th).

Is this currently possible, or would it be possible to add as a feature?

What I do is create an Octree on the cloud I want to speed up display of, and then turn off visibility of the original cloud, and turn on the visibility of the octree which will be a child to that cloud, I then set its display mode to points, then raise the display level until it looks good to you but is still fast, my clouds Level 11 works the best for me, it barely looks different but will be only a few hundred thousand points vs hundreds of millions.

Yes, you can create a reduced version with the octree (but make sure you select the original cloud and not the octree when running the tools).

We had such a feature in the past (displaying one out of X points) but we replaced it by the LoD mechanism. This LoD mechanism also relies on the octree, so it takes some time before being active (you can see the progress in the Console)

This is a really cool tip!! I just tested and works like a charm!! octree 11 feels like the sweet spot. I wish there was a but to trigger this on/off instead of doign manually,

I also noticed that if you deciamte a cloud, there is option to decimated based on Octree level, so may be this way is faster.