Compass Trace Tool: allow mesh to remain visible but excluded from entity selection

[sindrismara]

Hi,

I am working on a quarry wall mapping project where I need to trace geological layer boundaries using the Compass plugin's Trace Tool. My dataset consists of both a point cloud and a high-resolution textured 3D mesh of the same site, both co-registered.

The issue is that the layer boundaries in my quarry are defined texturally (colour banding between lithologies) rather than geometrically. The textured mesh renders these colour boundaries significantly more clearly and accurately than the raw point cloud, because the photogrammetric texturing process produces a cleaner, higher-fidelity colour representation of the rock face than the per-point RGB values in the point cloud.

I would therefore like to trace on the point cloud (as Compass requires) while keeping the textured mesh visible in the viewport as a visual reference. However, when both entities are visible simultaneously, Compass throws an 'Invalid entity type' error.

I have tried selecting only the point cloud in the DB Tree before launching Compass, but this does not resolve the conflict in version 2.14 beta. I also cannot use the Space bar to toggle mesh visibility mid-trace, because placing each trace node overwrites the DB Tree selection with the new trace object, making it impossible to quickly toggle the mesh on and off between nodes.

What I am essentially asking for is a way to mark an entity as 'visible but ignored by plugins' or a lock or exclusion flag in the DB Tree that would allow Compass (and other plugins) to skip non-point-cloud entities during their entity type validation, while still rendering them in the viewport.

Is there any workaround for this in the current version, or would this be feasible as a feature addition?

Thank you

[daniel]

I'm not sure the plugin's author (Sam Thiele) visits the forum. Maybe you could send him a message directly (I believe his contact is on the plugin's Wiki page)

But another way might be to convert the textured mesh to a (very) dense point cloud? (with 'Edit > Mesh > Sample points')

[sindrismara]

Hi Daniel

Yeah, thats a satisfactory workaround, much more computationally intense but works. Thanks a bunch!