Finding a solution to display CAD text in Pointools (Text overlay pointcloud, animations)

Question

Dear All, 
 We need to produce very long animation from MMS lidar survey (eg. 100 km of railway survey). 
 We also need to display CAD texts onto pointcloud during that animation (eg. mile marker, catenary number, etc...). 
 On the Communities, there are many posts and former answers explaining that Pointools is not dedicated to CAD, ie doesn't support very well CAD features. Indeed when we import Text from Microstation , then text orientation is lost and is displayed in 2D, not in 3D (see screenshot below). 
 We tried another solution : converting text into 3D extude text (=3D parametric model). Then we export that text into OBJ and try to display it into Pointcloud. Here many issues happened either in Microstation & Pointools. 
 Let me detail these issues step by step: 
 Issue 01 :It appears that Microstation doesn't explode text into constant feature. you get letter/number either as complex plane shape (ok for extruding) or as hole ? (impossible to extrude) >> see screenshot attached for an example. 
 Issue 02 : impossible to extrude all these feature in a batch. You need to extrude each feature one by one, so forget about it if you have thousand of text to convert in 3D. 
 Issue 03: when you export your text convert into 3D parametric shape into OBJ , the obj file is corrupted. A simple QA-QC with Meshlab returns nothing... Here again I stress a Bentley interoperability issue between Pointools & Microstation (2 Bentley softs ! ...why DGN is not handled ?). Obj format is the only 3D format in common between the 2 soft, but Microstation Obj output seems not to work well on basic 3D parametric object such as text... 
 WOuld you please comment that post and give me your expertise on these questions ? 
 Thanks, 
 antoine

Felix James · Answer

Hi Antoine, 
 Have you tried applying a thickness and exporting to OBJ? To apply a specific colour you can either modify the material in Pointools: 
 
 Alternately you can use a 3rd party product (such as Meshlabs) to colour the vertices of the OBJ and then attach this to Pointools. Pointools will then display the colour you have chosen.

Antoine Billault · Answer

Sorry Felix but we work on accurate project and obj data must matches with pointcloud. The best solution is to handle ref frame. Therefore manual transfo is not a good option and is time consuming to get a bad result. 
I made some investigation : I export 3D text into different output from Microstation (FBX, DAE, OBJ). I also made some QA-QC with 3D Open format converter (please visit www.greentoken.de/onlineconv or sourceforge.net/.../assimp-3.1 ) 
The conclusion is very clear : Pointools doesn't handle neither 3DS nor OBJ with large coordinates . If I import a 3DS file Pointools crashes, and If I use an OBJ then its location is wrong. SO no way with these 2 formats, and at this point no solution. 
Again here I suggest an efficient interoperability between Bentley softs, especially for 3D format. 
 
There is another way: 
I could transform my poincloud from EPSG to local frame, but as my project deals with 100 km of railway I will soon face the same pb after 10km of animation... 
 
antoine