Tips for viewport rendering

Modified on Fri, 03 Mar 2023 at 05:44 AM

Manage world coordinates

Georeferenced point clouds with large coordinates can easily challenge GPUs and cause precision artifacts. Those point clouds look rasterized or grid-like. When opening a point cloud for the first time, select Origin from the Offset type dropdown menu in the Octree Options dialogue to prevent these issues.


Beware of the quality & performance tradeoff

Increasing the GPU cache and decreasing the Minimum coverage under  Preferences > Viewport Rendering will boost the number of points rendered and thereby improve the render quality. Beware; this might slow down the rendering.


Choose the right material settings

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


If your point cloud does not contain RGB color information, select a suitable color source (Object color, Elevation, or Intensity) and select Shaded. 



For the shaded option to work, normals must be available. Normal computation is enabled by default when opening a point cloud for the first time. Under Object Inspector > Object Attributes, you can verify the availability of Normals.


To choose the Intensity color source, verify that your point cloud contains intensity information under Object Inspector > Object Attributes.