General Tips for Point Cloud Display

Modified on Mon, 9 Dec at 4:36 PM

Manage World Coordinates

Geo-referenced point clouds with large coordinates can cause GPU precision artifacts, making them appear rasterized or grid-like. When opening a point cloud for the first time, select Origin from the Offset type drop-down menu in the Octree Generation Settings to prevent these issues.


Beware of the Quality & Performance Tradeoff

Increasing the GPU cache and decreasing the Minimum coverage under Preferences > Viewport Rendering can boost the number of points rendered, improving render quality. However, be aware that this may slow down viewport rendering performance.


Choose Suitable Material Settings

When opening a point cloud, a new surface material is created and assigned to it. Select the point cloud and adjust the Size parameter under Object Inspector > Material Attributes for a more closed appearance.


If your point cloud lacks RGB color information, choose a suitable color source (Object color, Elevation, or Intensity) under Object Inspector > Color Source. Then, select either Flat shaded or PBR under Shading mode in Object Inspector > Material Attributes. For this to work, normals must be available. 


Normal computation is enabled by default when opening a point cloud for the first time. You can verify the availability of normals under Object Inspector > Object Attributes.


To use the Intensity color source, ensure that your point cloud contains intensity information. Check this under Object Inspector > Object Attributes.