Point Cloud is a reverse engineering software which offers the ability to reconstruct the geometry of an object from a point cloud that describes it.
Point Cloud can drape a surface over a point cloud or wrap a mesh around a point cloud. Draping a surface is similar to laying a piece of cloth over an object. The surface is deformed to take the shape of the object along the drape direction. A surface can be draped along one of the six orthogonal directions (top, bottom, front, back, right and left) or a custom user specified direction. Wrapping a mesh is similar to wrapping cloth all around an object to close it completely. Point Cloud has the ability to wrap a mesh around a concave or a convex point cloud.
Point Cloud is designed to be extremely user friendly and easy to understand. The tutorials can help you get started in the shortest possible time.
The Point Cloud software consists of the following menus:
File
View
Points
Surface
Mesh
Tools
Window
Help
Point Cloud comes with detailed documentation for each menu as well as a tutorial to get you started in the shortest possible time.
The Point File Format
A Point file format is basically a text file containing the x, y and z coordinates of a point on each line. Usually the coordinates are stored in the XYZ order. However, points are sometimes stored in the YXZ order. This is common in survey data where the YXZ order is referred to Northing, Easting and Elevation. Sometimes each point in the point file has a point number and/or description. An example of a point file with points stored in the XYZ order and has point numbers and descriptions.
1,5.678232,3.282384,6.112837 , FirstPoint
2,7.802343,6.792039,2.489561 , SecondPoint
3,2.454512,7.453219,3.454865 , ThirdPoint
... and so on