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:
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
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
Development
Freebasic with Opengl (EXE and source provided)
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