CloudCompare Release Notes (2014/07/09)

Dear CloudCompare enthusiasts,

A new version has been released. You'll find it here:

CloudCompare 2.6.0
installer version

CloudCompare 2.6.0
7z archive version

ccViewer 1.32
7z archive version

Windows 64 bits

Windows 32 bits

Mac OS 64 bits

Thanks to Andy Maloney MacOS apps are available here

Linux 64 bits

Thanks to Romain Janvier packages for ubuntu/debian are available here

Sources

git repository: https://github.com/cloudcompare/trunk (for compilation instructions, refer to the wiki)

Once again, many thanks to all our supporters who made donations on pledgie!

Click here to lend your support to: CloudCompare and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

A lot of work on this new release, with two new plugins, several new tools, and a lot of enhancements and bug fixes!

New plugin: qCork

to perform boolean operations on meshes (= Constructive Solid Geometry)
allows to compute the difference, union or intersection of two CLOSED meshes
based on the Cork library by Gilbert Bernstein (Stanford)
current limitations:

doesn't keep the mesh(es) attributes (color, nrormals, etc.)
only available on Windows

New plugin: qFaro I/O

to open Faro FWS/FLS files
should be silently loaded by CC on startup: you can use the standard 'File > Open method or simply drag and drop the file on a 3D view
only available on Windows (installer version)

New methods:

Tools > Clean > Noise filter

this tool is similar to qPCL plugin's SOR filter (Statistical Outliers Filter) but with more options:

possibility to set a (sphere) radius for the nearest neighbors search instead of a fixed number of points (much better if the cloud density is not constant)
possibility to set an absolute error instead of a relative error
option to remove isolated points

Edit > Mesh > Flag vertices by type

mesh quality measurement tool
flags all the vertices of the mesh (with a dedicated scalar field) with different values depending on whether they are belonging to a standard edge (0), to an edge on a hole border (1) or to a non-manifold edge (2)
displays in the console the total number of each type of edges (normal/hole border/non-manifold) as well as the total number of edges

Edit > Mesh > Measure volume

mesh volume measurement tool
the result is only valid if the mesh is closed (CC will warn you if it's not the case - and you can check that yourself with the new 'Flag vertices by type' method)

Meshes can now be exported to DXF (Autocad) files

New 'Display' options:

'Display > Lock rotation around vert. axis' to lock the manual rotation around the screen vertical axis (shortcut: 'L')

'Display > Enter bubble-view mode' to enable 'bubble-view' mode, akind of viewer-based perspective mode blocked on the current camera position, with Z axis locked and a high field of view by default (shortcut: 'B'). This is the new default mode enabled when clicking on the 'Apply' button of a TLS/GBL sensor (typically opened with a PTX or Faro file for instance)

New feature: "Transformation history"

all rigid transformations applied to any 3D object are now 'tracked'. In practical they are accumulated in a history transformation matrix for each entity.
for instance this allows to easily determine the global transformation applied to an entity since loading time (even after multiple manual transformation or automatic registration steps)
a dedicated widget ('Transformation history') has been added to the the 'Properties' dialog. This widget displays the matrix either as a "standard" 4x4 matrix, or as a rotation axis associated to a rotation angle and a translation vector. This widget also allows the user to copy the matrix to the clipboard or to save it as a text file (for opening it later in 'Edit > Apply transformation' for instance)

New buttons in the 'Apply Transformation' dialog:

'ASCII file' to import a transformation matrix from an ASCII file (see above)
'Clipboard' to paste the clipboard contents (hopefully corresponding to a transformation matrix ;)

Enhancements:

For 64 bits versions, the max octree depth is now 21 instead of 10

this way CC will be more efficient with clouds above 20 or 30 M. points.
the resulting increase in memory consumption shouldn't be an issue for recent computers (the new octree needs 12 bytes per point instead of 8, which corresponds to an increase of 380 Mb for 100 M. points)

The 'Edit > Merge' method now works with meshes

qPoissonRecon upgraded:

now uses the latest PoissonRecon version 6.11
screening is now activated by default
the user can now choose to output the 'density' parameter as a SF (this let him reduce the output mesh extents afterwards)

qEDL (Eye Dome Lighting) now behaves correctly even in perspective mode!

Point picking tool:

the vector coordinates have been restored in the 2-points labels

Texture handling:

textures are now handled in a much smarter and proper way (OBJ/PLY/FBX formats)
less memory consumption + original filenames are preserved

FBX file format:

materials and texture are now supported (input/output)

New options in the Bundler import dialog:

choose the keyponts/orthophotos vertical axis with radio buttons (X, Y, Z and Custom)
choose the ortho-rectification method:

optimized: the 'classic' method based on CC's own parameter optimization process
direct: an alternate method based only on Bundler's output parameters

qSRA (Surface of Revolution Analysis) plugin:

the triangles of the exported meshes (surface of revolution textured with the displacement map) are now in the right order
memory leak fixed (when displaying a conical projection map)

ASCII import/export:

RGB colors can now be imported or exported as float values (between 0 and 1) instead of unsigned bytes (0-255)
new 'Apply' button (replaces 'Ok')
new 'Apply all' button to attempt to load all the files with the same parameters

PLY import:

new 'Apply' button (replaces 'Ok'): the dialog will remember the previous configuration and will try to restore it the next time
new 'Apply all' button : the dialog is skipped whenever CC can successfully restore the previous configuration while opening new files

PTX import:

grid translation is now checked against 'big coordinates' (Global Shift & Scale mechanism)
cancel button also cancels the normals computation!
sensors corresponding to each scan are automatically created
CC will now ask the user if the normals should be computed or not
when loading PTX file from the command line, normals are not computed by default. Use the option '-COMPUTE_PTX_NORMALS' to force their computation.

LAS import:

CC now handles LAS 1.4 files: the dialog has a new section that allows the user to load the custom fields defined in the LAS file 'extra bytes' section

VTK import:

VTK I/O filter is now smarter and can read Paraview VTK files with multiple elements per line

PCL import/export:

now fully integrated in the main application (if the qPCL I/O plugin is successfully loaded)
all PCD files can be loaded and saved via the standard 'File > Open' and 'File > Save' menu entries
the equivalent icons of the qPCL plugin has been removed
ccViewer can also load PCD files

'Edit > Sensors' menu has been reorganized

Camera sensor management enhanced:

camera sensors are now created automatically when clouds are loaded from Bundler or ICM files
a dialog let the user create or edit camera sensors
the camera symbol in 3D is fully configurable (display scale, with or without frustum, etc.)
camera sensors (and images) can now be saved in BIN files
the 'Camera Sensor > Project uncertainty' and 'Camera Sensor > Compute points visibility' are now smarter and can be applied on any point cloud

Ground Based Laser sensor management enhanced:

GBL sensors are now created automatically when clouds are loaded from PTX or Faro files
the user can now apply the GBL sensor 'viewport' to the 3D display ("bubble view' mode) with the 'Apply' button in the sensor properties
the sensor symbol in 3D is now correctly centered on the optical center (and can be used with the magnifier icon to zoom/focus on it)
'Theta' and 'Phi' are replaced by the clearer 'Yaw' and 'Pitch' names
'Edit > Sensor > View from sensor' method is now cleverer
'Edit > Sensor > GBL Sensor > Show depth map' is now cleverer

Camera parameters dialog:

should not 'disconnect' from the current 3D view anymore
new setting: 'zNear relative position' to change the position of the near clipping plane in perspective mode (due to the way near and far clipping planes are handled in CC, this is only a relative position, and it cannot be set at any given depth)

New keyboard shortcuts:

'A' to toggle all selected entities activation (i.e. enable/disable state)
'L' to lock the rotation around the Z axis
'B' to enter bubble-view mode

Density computation:

only one method now with a dedicated dialog:

ability to choose either the precise or approximate methods
ability to choose how the density should be computed (number of neighbors, surface or volume)

Command line mode:

New options:

'-FBX_EXPORT_FMT' to specify the format when exporting meshes to FBX. Available formats are currently (FBX_binary, FBX_ascii, FBX_encrypted, FBX_6.0_binary, FBX_6.0_ascii, FBX_6.0_encrypted). If not set CC will display a message box to let the user select the output format (even in command line mode ;)
'-AUTO_SAVE' + ON/OFF: to set whether output clouds or meshes should be saved after each applied algorithm (currently ON by default)
'-COMPUTE_PTX_NORMALS' to force CC to compute normals when loading PTX files
new option after 'SAVE_CLOUDS' or 'SAVE_MESHES': 'ALL_AT_ONCE' to tell CC to (try to) save all loaded clouds (resp. meshes) in a single file. The format must support this features (i.e. BIN or E57 for clouds, BIN or FBX for meshes)
new option '-TYPE' (after '-DENSITY' or '-APPROX_DENSITY') to specify the type of density to compute

options are: KNN (number of neighbors), SURFACE (surface density) or VOLUME (volume density)

Global Shift can now be configured when opening a file in command line mode:

after '-O' (open file) use the '-GLOBAL_SHIFT' option and:

either 'AUTO' to let CC handle the big coordinates automatically
or the 3 values of the shift vector to apply
example: 'CloudCompare -O -GLOBAL_SHIFT AUTO myfile.asc'

The default timestamp for output files now incorporates seconds (so as to avoid overwriting files generated too quickly)

qRansac Shape Detection plugin:

parameters have been updated so as to be (much) clearer

CC now detects points with NaN (not a number) coordinates and will automatically replace them by (0,0,0) to avoid (big) issues later

The parameters of some primitives can now be interactively changed:

Sphere (radius), Cone (height, bottom radius, top radius) or Cylinder (height, radius) can now be modified directly via the 'Properties' dialog

New 'sand-box' methods:

Tools > Sand box > Create cloud from selected entities centers
Tools > Sand box > Compute best registration RMS matrix

Point list picking tool:

new checkbox to display the global coordinates (instead of shifted ones) for shifted clouds

2D Labels:

for points with an associated scalar value, the scalar field name is used instead of 'Scalar' (e.g. 'Density = 1.23' instead of 'Scalar = 1.23')

Bug fixes:

the spinboxes of the bounding-box editing dialog were oversized
the 'Cancel' button of progress dialogs was invisible on the x64 version
in some very limit cases, the distance computation could enter in an infinite loop
qSRA: memory leak fixed (when displaying a conical projection map)
the 'original' coordinates displayed in 2D labels (or in the console for picked points) was wrong (global shift was applied in the opposite way)
the global shift/scale infos were wrongly applied when exporting points picked with the 'Point list picking' tool
for some clouds loaded from an ASCII file and with very particular sizes, the associated scalar fields size could be wrongly set (while the data was correctly loaded) and CC wouldn't accept to display them...
memory leak when loading PTX files
starting the 'Manual Segmentation tool' (scissors icon) in perspective mode could dramatically change the EDL rendering (anyway, using EDL in perspective mode is not really supported yet ;)
qPoissonRecon: the multi-threaded version (i.e. the 32 bits version on Windows) could crash sometimes
3D mouse: on some configurations, the 3D mouse was not handled properly
the global shift information was not applied to the cameras when importing Bundler files with large coordinates
saving E57 files could make CC crash sometimes (due to an internal inconsistency in libE57) - CC is now more robust to this kind of errors!
3D names now follow the entity when they are interactively translated (scissors tool)
cloud cloning was not preserving the point size
when manually segmenting a mesh, its textures could be wrongly released from the OpenGL context (causing display errors in the best case)
funny things (crash, etc.) could happen when choosing another option than 'leave empty' to fill empty cells in the Rasterize tool...

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.cloudcompare.org/release/notes/20141026/cc_release_notes_20141026.html