Create POD files for use in Descartes or MicroStation to give best possible display performance the point cloud.

Background

Sometimes importing large or very dense point clouds can affect the display performance in Bentley Pointools and MicroStation. All Bentley products utilize the POD file format for point clouds. To improve performance the following practices are recommended

Steps to Accomplish

1. Apply a Uniform Filter / Spatial Filter on import. The Uniform Filter (Bentley Pointools) or Spatial Filter (MicroStation) is a powerful spatial filter useful for point cloud decimation. . Set the Uniform Filter to 0.001 (1mm) or 0.002 (2mm), this will create a POD with no point closer than the specified distance to another. This will usually result in reducing the file size by removing duplicate points or points that are too close together and also organises the points in a more efficient way. Consider what the POD will be used for, would a spacing of 0.010 (10mm) be sufficient? If so, you could reduce file size by 90%.
2. Segment large areas. If you have a single POD which covers a very large area you might consider creating several, smaller PODs. This can be done using the Tile Export tool in Descartes or the Grid tool in Bentley Pointools.
3. Consider storage. Point clouds are typically very large files often several gigabytes in size. Ideally they should be stored on a hard drive separate from the computers operating system. Preferably this hard drive would be used exclusively for storing point cloud data ensuring that there is minimum fragmentation of the disk space. Faster hard drives such as solid state drives are preferable but consideration should also be given to storage capacity. POD files can be compressed to save up to 50% disk space, which is useful for archiving old point clouds.
4. Use a suitable graphics card. The recommended requirement for a graphics card in Bentley Pointools V8i are a NVidia or ATI (AMD) Workstation graphics card with a minimum 512MB on-board memory. Ensure graphics drivers are up to date. Minimum display resolution is 1920 x 1080 with true colour.

For MicroStation any 3D accelerator card supported by DirectX 9c; minimum resolution of 1024x768 with 24-bit colour. For a list of supported graphics card please use the following link:

Recommended Graphics Cards for 3D Workflows

Note:

Re-export POD if you experience bad performance. If you have issues with the display performance of a POD file that has been with created no filter applied, it can be re-exported and a suitable filter applied to create a new POD. This can be done in Bentley Pointools V8i and using the Bentley Pointools PODCreator using the Uniform Filter. In MicroStation use the Convert command and enable Spatial Filtering.

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