[pdal] Point cloud viewer in QGIS

[Nicolas Cadieux]

Hi,

I agree with your assessment of CloudCompare and would like to see this go ahead.  I am not an experienced programmer and would not know where to start.  But I am wondering if you can work using the new mesh engine that is now in QGIS?  Can you build on top of that or is that a completely different ball game?  You could at least contact the programmers  that did that part for some inspiration.

Good luck.

Nicolas Cadieux
Ça va bien aller!

> Le 6 juill. 2020 à 10:01, Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> Hi all
> 
> I have been looking into ways to get native point cloud support into
> QGIS. By native I mean to have a new point cloud map layer type which
> would support LAS and possibly other formats, and it would display the
> data in 2D/3D map views together with other map layers. At this point
> I am interested only in the visualization, no further
> analysis/processing. While the existing tools such as CloudCompare or
> Potree are great to visualize point clouds, we are IMHO still missing
> integration with a proper GIS, which would open many new possibilities
> and make point cloud data more accessible to ordinary GIS users.
> 
> I am aware of the fact that this is not going to be an easy task for a
> couple of evenings :-) We would like to run a crowd-funding campaign
> to make the development possible.
> 
> I wanted to reach out to the PDAL community and see what advice the
> point cloud gurus would have. I have a fair amount of experience with
> QGIS development and some with 3D graphics, but I am relatively new to
> the whole ecosystem of point cloud data. I have started to look into
> PDAL, CloudCompare and Potree to get a better understanding of the
> challenges.
> 
> So far it looks like it would be a good idea to use the PDAL library
> for I/O - it supports a variety of formats through a common
> abstraction which would make our life much easier. The next thing is
> how to deal with rendering. From what I understand, CloudCompare reads
> the whole point cloud file into memory and builds an in-memory octree
> which is then used for data access. Potree needs the data to be
> pre-processed beforehand with PotreeConverter tool into an octree, its
> nodes are then stored in files and requested as needed. Entwine does
> similar indexing, with a different file format. So it seems that it
> would be nice to cover both cases:
> 1. point clouds without index (it would be created on the fly in memory),
> 2. point clouds with index (stored on a local drive or maybe on a
> remote server) - with much faster loading times and supporting
> potentially really huge datasets.
> 
> I guess once we have an octree built, we can start thinking about
> visualization of the data... There are various things to consider in
> addition to out of core rendering (to pick the right chunks of data
> based on level of detail - already handled in QGIS 3D to some degree).
> It will probably be a long run to make the point cloud visualization
> look good - splatting, dynamic point sizing, eye-dome lighting and
> possibly more features already supported by Potree / CloudCompare.
> 
> I don't want to make this mail too long - at some point I will try to
> prepare a QGIS Enhancement Proposal (QEP) with more details. I would
> be very grateful for any comments and suggestions, where do you see
> possible issues, where else to look for some inspiration etc.
> 
> Thanks
> Martin
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