CloudCompare forum

Hi,
When I import a point cloud with coordinates that have 3 digits after the point, it increases to 6 digits. The new digits are not only 0. The extra digits stay through exporting, increasing the size of the resulting file, and causing troubles when importing in other software (canupo, coltop) because it becomes to heavy. I am not worry about the lost of precision, but more about the size increase. I tried with local coordinates too (at first I was working with georef. clouds, so Cloud compare was shifting them back to local coordinates.)

thanks,
Cath

Indeed, CloudCompare stores coordinates internally as 32bits float (this explains why there's a slight modification of the values - which should be very small however!). I guess that if you round up the coordinates back to 3 decimals, you would get the original value?

And for the export issue, as CloudCompare has no notion of coordinates precision or anything like that, it outputs coordinates in ASCII files with 6 digits by default (and 8 if CC has originally shifted the cloud at loading time).

What bugs me is when you speek about "troubles when importing in other software (canupo, coltop)". What kind of troubles exactly? They can't read the coordinates?

Anyway, if it's really blocking it wouldn' be too difficult to add a specific dialog for ASCII export that would let you specify the number of digits?

Hi,
After exporting the data from Cloud Compare, I then truncate the digits to keep only the last 3 and it solves the problem.
Sorry I wasn't clear in my first post, but the problem when importing in other software is only a matter of size. Yes they can read the coordinates, but because there is so much digits it slows down/crashes the other softwares. When using the truncated file with 3 or 4 digits it's fine.
thanks,