Dear CloudCompare enthusiasts,
A new version has been released. You'll find it here:
- Windows
- 32 bits: installer or zip (you may have to install Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) to launch this version)
- 64 bits: installer or zip (you may have to install Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) to launch this version)
- Warning: if you wish to install this version in the same folder as an older version, you'll have to uninstall this latter first (or manually delete the 'plugins' folder)
- Mac OS X:
- go to asmaloney.com/software
- Linux:
- sorry, you'll have to wait this time (Romain is busy - note that the version tagged 2.5.3 on his repository is in fact the 2.5.2!)
- Sources:
- the corresponding github tag is https://github.com/cloudcompare/trunk/releases/tag/v2.5.3
This is a (hopefully) 'stable' version with lots of small improvements and bug fixes:
- New method: "Edit > Normals > Orient > With Minimum Spanning Tree"
- This is an alternative method to find the correct orientation of normals based on the determination of a Minimum Spanning Tree
- It may require a lot of memory but it works better on smooth shapes than the former method based on Fast-Marching (formerly called "Resolve normals direction" and now renamed and move to "Edit > Normals > Orient > With Fast-Marching")
- It is also automatically suggested by CC if no preferred orientation has been set in the Normals computation tool.
- New method: "Tools > Other > Density > Accurate (at a given scale)"
- More accurate method to compute the local density (= number of points inside a sphere centered on each point)
- The old version is now accessible via "Tools > Other > Density > Approximate" (and it simply outputs the distance to the nearest neighbor now)
- Command line options have been changed accordingly (see wiki)
- New method: "Tools > Other > Remove duplicate points"
- Removes duplicate points (creates a new cloud)
- New method: "Edit > Crop"
- To crop a point cloud inside a box
- New method: "Color banding" (thanks to M.J. Smith)
- New option of the 'Edit > Color > Height Ramp' method
- Enhancements:
- ccViewer now supports GL filters (i.e. 'shader' plugins: qEDL and qSSAO)
- The GL filter banner (yellow) is now smaller, and is displayed at the top of the 3D view (it doesn't hide the scale anymore!)
- Spatial sub-sampling tool ('SPACE' mode):
- about twice as fast
- consumes much less memory
- now the default method when the dialog opens
- the slider has now a 'logarithmic' behavior (i.e. spacing value will grow much slower)
- The ASCII file loading dialog is a bit smarter:
- you can now open ASCII files with invalid columns (such as text labels, etc.) as long as the column is not assigned to any property
- The OBJ importer now supports polylines ('l' tag)
- Global shift/scale:
- CC will ask the user when exporting points with the 'Point List Picking' tool if he wishes to keep global shift/scale information
- CC will warn the user if the translation applied with the 'Edit > Apply transformation' tool is too big (in which case it can be set as 'global shift' instead)
- New 'preferred' orientations for the 'Normals computation' tool:
- relatively to (0,0,0) (positive or negative)
- Distance computation accuracy slightly enhanced (use of double precision internally)
- The DXF I/O filter can now even load polylines with no descriptor
- Command line mode has a lots of new options (thanks to A. Bevan, University College London):
- computation of the best fitting plane
- ICP registration
- crop
- make the (bounding-box) centers of loaded entities match
- specify export format (clouds or meshes) as well as the extension
- prevent CC from automatically a timestamp as suffix for output files
- (see the updated documentation here: wiki)
- Normals are no longer computed by default when loading a mesh without normals
- Normals can now be computed on a mesh either 'per-vertex' (mean normal vector of all connected triangles) or 'per-triangle' (gives a 'faceted' look)
- The 'Point pair-based registration' tool now handles virtual points with very large coordinates (useful to register a cloud with GPS control points for instance)
- Labels now display both the shifted and the original points coordinates if the cloud is shifted/scaled
- The VTK I/O filter now handles TRIANGLE_STRIP elements
- Cross section tool: the box position can now be edited ('advanced' button)
- Other:
- ATOM feed enabled on the forum (http://www.danielgm.net/cc/forum/) (use the native ATOM support on IE or Firefox, or install an ATOM feed reader app on Chrome, e.g. "RSS Feed Reader")
- Bug fixes:
- Deleting a 3D view and then selecting an entity previously displayed in this view would make CC crash
- The default value for scaling of the 'shift on load' dialog was 0
- A bug in the (spatial) sub-sampling tool has been fixed (could make CC crash)
- The cloud/cloud distance computation dialog was always computing the octrees twice!
- DXF files generated by CloudCompare were corrupted (bug from dxflib)
- The Z coordinate of polyline vertices exported in DXF format was wrongly replaced by the Y coordinate
- Vertical profiles generated by the qSRA plugin were all the same
- In some cases no SF or invalid SF were generated by the Rasterize tool (point cloud export)
- The translation obtained by ICP registration with adaptive scale was wrong! (scale was not applied)
- The 'repetitive slice extraction' option of the 'Cross section' tool was behaving strangely (some slices were sometimes fused together)
- Pixel distances were squared twice in the Bilateral filter (shader)
- The 'Point pair-based registration' dialog was not automatically reset
- Wrong error code returned by PLY I/O filter when failing to create the output file
- Meshes color couldn't be changed anymore (with 'Edit > Set color')
- GL filters rendering was downgraded when switching from perspective to ortho. view
You'll also find the new ccViewer versions here:
- Windows
- 32 bits: zip (you may have to install Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) to launch this version)
- 64 bits: zip (you may have to install Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) to launch this version)
- Linux and Mac OS:
- same as of CloudCompare (see above)
And last but not least, you can make donations to the project via'Pledgie':
Enjoy,
CloudCompare Admin
PS: if you can't read properly this message, you can read it here: http://www.danielgm.net/cc/release/notes/20140223/cc_release_notes_20140223.html