Resolution of point clouds VS Microstation

Hello there!

Please can someone help me? I am using microstation V8i SELECTseries 3, I need to work with point clouds and making 3D models. 

When I load point cloud to microstation with original resolution, it is so hard to work with it. I don't know if it is because low PC performance, or it is because microstation.

When I use another softwer for pointclouds on the same PC, it works with no problems, so why in microstation is problem with loading big point clouds?

When I degradate point cloud resolution in another softwer, from example from 2 000 000 000 points to 200 000 points its relative OK and I can work with it. But why I can not use full resolution in Microstation? 

Is new microstation connect better in working with point clouds?

  • additional information about HW and SW

    Thanks for sharing the detail. With some exagerration, V8i is able to utilize maybe 1/4 of your workstation resources ... and I'd like to have such piece of HW on my desk ;-)

    Are you able to test how the latest MicroStation CE Update 10 (Update 11 should be released soon) work on your PC with the point clouds?

    I think this should be inaf for modeling in modern CAD softver, using point clouds with out additional degradation of resolution ...

    I guess it's enough for any "normal" engineering task (not talking about simulation of the whole Boeing model or AI learning ;-). In my opinion HW is rarely issue today, the problem is in SW optimization ... it's easier to offer new and new features and tools than to spend months and years to optimize code to maximum performance. Another problem (which is valid to MicroStation) is that single focused application will "always" behave better than universal one. As developer I can imagine that to optimize point cloud software (with zero or limited vector editing features) to super speed is far easier than to do the same in MicroStation with so many features (vectors, rasters, dynamic elements resymbolization...) and many software layers between data and display engine.

    With regards,

      Jan

  • I am member of big company (volkswagen), there are some rules of administrating computers, so I can not install new softwers on my PC, anyway in close future we will use microstation CE, so may then I will know you how it goes :)

  • When I degradate point cloud resolution in another softwer, from example from 2 000 000 000 points

    A point in MicroStation is 3 double-precision numbers: X, Y and Z.  That's 24bytes per point.  A point-cloud point has additional data.  2 000 000 000 points therefore require at least 24GB of memory to be read into MicroStation's memory.

    I am using microstation V8i SELECTseries 3

    MicroStation V8i is a 32-bit application.  The maximum memory it can see is 4GB (on Windows 64-bit). 

    why I can not use full resolution in Microstation? 

    It's not surprising that data six times bigger than MicroStation's memory is not handled speedily.

    Connect is 64 bit software so can use far more memory

    MicroStation CONNECT will use as much real memory as Windows can give it.

    RAM: 32GB

    That may be enough to let MicroStation CONNECT open a 24GB file.  You'll need to use Windows Task Manager to monitor memory consumption.  You may need to add more real memory.

     
    Regards, Jon Summers
    LA Solutions

  • A point in MicroStation is 3 double-precision numbers: X, Y and Z.  That's 24bytes per point.  A point-cloud point has additional data.  2 000 000 000 points therefore require at least 24GB of memory to be read into MicroStation's memory.

    I think this assumption and calculation is pretty incorrect. Point cloud file formats are usually designed for optimized access to required data filtered by area and level of detail, so rarely it is necessary to read in memory everything.

    I experienced situations when MicroStation V8i performance was not very good with large data point clouds, but not the whole memory (32bit adressable) was utilized and there was also no swapping, so the bottleneck is probably somewhere else.

    Regards,

      Jan

  • I think this assumption and calculation is pretty incorrect

    I'm making simplistic assumptions, which may not be exact, for the purpose of illustrating the memory capacity problem.  IIRC the PointCloud app. uses memory mapped files, which paints a very different picture when it comes to memory usage.  However, we're attempting to help someone who is concerned because 2 billion points don't fit comfortably into a 32-bit address space.  Delving into the details of how PointClouds work in MicroStation is spelunking too deeply (in my opinion).

     
    Regards, Jon Summers
    LA Solutions