Point clouds have become incredibly popular, especially with brands like Leica making substantial investments in technology that is truly groundbreaking.
However, I have a significant issue with point clouds: they are too good. The level of detail and accuracy achievable with 3D scanning far surpasses what traditional hand measurements can provide. So, what’s the problem?
The issue lies in the fact that 3D scanning technology has outpaced the software designed to process and make use of that data. The result is that while people are initially wowed by the raw output, the real challenge emerges when it comes to working with that data in software.
Many software packages can import point cloud files and display the resulting “element” fairly well. But converting that point cloud into something useful is incredibly tedious and far less glamorous than the point cloud itself.
Point clouds, after all, are exactly that: clouds of points. Millions of them. Even if you manage to convert those points into individual nodes, you still need to connect them in the right way, create surfaces, and assign material properties. This is no small feat—it can take months to do properly.
Autodesk Recap Pro offers a way to mesh point clouds using Cloud Credits, generating an .obj file that can be imported into Inventor. With the Mesh Enabler plugin, you can create a surface from the mesh. However, this process can take hours—sometimes even days—and is far from straightforward.
To make matters worse, real-world structures are rarely perfect, which introduces further complications during the conversion process. Even if you’ve successfully created a surface, you now need to convert it into a solid body.
Despite these challenges, there are established workflows for working with point clouds, and AutoCAD offers one particularly useful feature that can help navigate this complexity.
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