Contour naming and export ID

[skogvold]

Hi,

First of all, to those working on Cloudcompare, thank you for creating this amazing piece of open source software!

I use point clouds for architectural projects, and sometimes I want to make custom terrain contour lines, e.g. 20 cm contours where the "official" map data available only has 100 cm contours.

Cloudcompare works great for making these from a detailed DTM / Lidar scan, but when trying to bring them into BIM software, for instance as DXF, there is no way of identifying them after importing. This makes it difficult to use them, and easy to make mistakes. I was thinking, is it possible to control the naming of the contour polylines or the layers they are assigned on export? The easiest way would be to name the DXF layers by Z height, for instance, instead of "Polyline number xxx" (which adds little value). Also control over the number of decimal places to use for these layer names would be great.

I know I can make a finished contour model in CC and export that, but sometimes I need the terrain to be editable inside the BIM software I'm using, and that requires importing the terrain data as polylines and creating the terrain model there (not the most user-friendly solution, but it's how it works..)

On a side note, it would be good to have general control over how contours are named upon creation inside CC. Right now if I work on a point cloud in metre units, it names the lines "Contour line value = 1", this quickly gets confusing when they have values of 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 but gets the same name. As mentioned above, possibility to export polyline name with their value instead of "polyline number" would be great.

Lastly, is it possible to filter the DB tree by criteria? If I want to select all point clouds with less than 1000 points for instance. This could be very useful for working with results from the Facets or Ransac functions..

[daniel]

Hi,

It took some time but following your feedback, I've at least improved the polyline naming a little bit:
- the real altitude will appear (not sure why a rounded one was displayed before)
- they will be properly grouped/sorted by altitude (with a clearer sub-part index if relevant)
- (they will also look 'closed' whenever possible)

And regarding your last question, the only 'query' mechanism for now is the 'Select entities by type and/or name' option when you right click on a group. This could be extended of course by anyone who has some C++ development skills ;)