Free 3D Point Cloud Viewer

A simple and free point cloud viewer for quickly reviewing low point cloud data sets.

About

If you have a passing interest in 2D/3D digitizing, reviewing point clouds, creating your own homebrew scanners or any other data capture projects you will understand the need for a lightweight viewer to review your test data. You will also understand that you don't want to purchase expensive software like Geomagic, or LeiosMesh just to review captured points and you certainly don't need the advanced capabilities of surface meshing or advanced measurement and editing tools at this early stage either.

If like me you have lots of small files with captured point clouds test data that you just want to see quickly then this is where this utility comes in handy.

In Action

Downloads

3D Point Cloud Viewer (Freebasic source included)

3D Point Cloud Viewer v018c.zip

Example T Rex 3d point cloud scan (227,408 xyzrgb points)

T-Rex-3D-Scan-by-Colin-Ord-2017.zip

Usable file format examples

3D Point Cloud Viewer example file formats.zip

Installation

Three files are included in the viewer ZIP are:

• 3d_point_cloud_viewer.ini
• 3d_point_cloud_viewer_v0_18c.exe
• 3d_point_cloud_viewer_v0_18c.bas

Extract and copy the *.ini and *.exe files to your chosen location. The *.ini just holds the window width, height and colour depth. Choose a window dimension that suits you and edit the file is required.

Default:

1024

768

24

To view your data sets either drop them onto the executable. A better option is to setup file associations for Obj, Asc, Txt, Xyz file types linking them to 3D Point Cloud Viewer. When the data files are double clicked the utility will open them up for viewing.

Key Features

• View 2D or 3D point clouds
  • Full colour point clouds
  • Single colour point clouds if no RGB available. See Hardware vertex shading below
  • Rotate, pan and zoom
  • Interactive point size ' fake solidify'
  • Data scan dimensions and statistics
  • Visual axis On/Off
  • Lighted/darken brightness (slow on large sets)
  • Hardware vertex shading - Select 'green solid type shading' for single colour point clouds

File formats

Import plain text as: Obj, Asc, Txt, Xyz.

N.b. Obj files can have faces etc but only vertex information will be read and processed.

Export: Obj (vertex only)

Data format examples

Basic XYZ - ASC - TXT

No blank lines in data scan files!

Comments start with a hash (#)

# cube

-10 -10 -10

...

Comma separated value

-1,-1,-5,255,0,1

Semicolon separated value

-1;-1;-5;255;0;1

Space separated value

-1 -1 -5 255 0 1

Tab separated value

-1 -1 -5 255 0 1

OBJ (points/vertices only - no colour)

Comments start with a hash (#)

# Rectangle

v -1 -1 5

...

Limitations

• Ascii / plain text files only
• Manually assign file associations (Obj, Asc, Txt, XYZ) to open files with 3d_point_could_viewer.exe
• Large full colour data sets can be viewed e.g. 1m+ points, but processing time will increase greatly

Development

Freebasic with Opengl (EXE and source provided)

• Development has ceased but the easy to follow and free source code is available for your own private or commercial use.

Disclaimer

Free of any license restrictions - do what you want with it!

Please let me know if the utility or example code was useful for your own 3D scanning projects.

Page Updated - 2nd February 2017