Point cloud in CAD software
A point cloud is a set of data points in some coordinate system.Point clouds may be created by 3D scanners. These devices measure in an automatic way a large number of points on the surface of an object, and often output a point cloud as a data file. The point cloud represents the set of points that the device has measured.
Pointools, was founded in 2003 with the mission of enabling the use of scan data, or point clouds to the average user workflows in AEC.It primarily came down to really helping to define workflows and having the technology that delivered performance to make it feasible to work with large point cloud files on the desktop.
In the past, the very large size of point cloud files has been one negative holding adoption bac. Related problems to file size are how fast you can look at a point cloud, what kind of visual quality you have and how much resources the point cloud takes up on your computer. With Pointools, we can see the use of point clouds increasing and the technology continuing to get better.
In the world of AEC, point clouds are becoming a more frequently utilized data type and engineers want to deploy them more often. They’ve become very cost effective to acquire, people want to use them, they want to grab the as-is world and they want to bring point clouds into hybrid workflows.