A similar tool you could meet in BricsCAD, it's named Project Section and it's located on the Point Cloud toolbar. First of all, you also need to create a section, you can create single or multiple sections, but you should use the Detail Section tool (Bimsection command). Define the area and next input the height of the section and you'll get some kind of limit box, next run the Pointcloudprojectsection command. In the left pop-up settings menu, you should define:

• Gap parameter - Controls the search area for the algorithm to draw lines. Gaps smaller than the specified value will be closed.

• Angular parameter - Controls the angular tolerance of the generated lines. High tolerance will result in pronounced right angles. This is useful for perpendicular plans. Generated lines with a smaller angle than the specified value will be merged.

• Minimum length parameter - Controls the minimum length of a generated line. Lines with a smaller length than the specified value will not be generated.

In both software, the result will be not perfect and you'll be forced to edit almost every line manually because you'll need to delete redundant lines, close gaps, adjust corners, etc. In BricsCAD you could try to do it automatically by Optimize button. The command makes corrections such as small gaps between lines or near vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. But before running it I recommend you left on the screen only lines relevant to one room because the tool analyzes all visible lines. After hiding unwanted lines run this tool and specify:

• Angle - Sets the angle tolerance, in degrees, with respect to the World Coordinate System (WCS). Near horizontal, vertical or diagonal lines within this angle tolerance will be optimized.

• Distance - Sets the distance tolerance (see Note). Parallel lines within this distance will be merged.

• Gap tolerance - Sets the gap tolerance (see Note). Gaps between collinear lines within the gap tolerance will be filled.

Click preview and you'll see optimized lines.

The combination of these tools could increase the speed of processing data by multiple times on some projects, but some of them will not be suitable for that tools. In this way, it'll be better to use semi-automatic tools for extracting lines. You could find these tools in the CloudWorx plugin. But before using them you should create a section in the desired place, and use the Quick Slice tools. One of the easiest is the Quick Slice Wall - it is based on an extracted plane from the wall. Just select it and click on any point on the wall. The software will change the coordinate system based on the wall and create a section at the particular specified point. Adjust the thickness of your section, try to use thinner slices, then your drawing will be more accurate. Next, you have two options for fitting polylines into the section of point clouds directly on the main screen:

• 1Point Polyline (cwgplane command) - Draw an auto-fit line string with a 1-point grow line segment. Each line segment expects one pick point and will "region grow" to find the best line for the point cloud. Each line segment will connect to the previous one as it is created.

• 2Points Polyline (cwbpline command) - Draw an auto-fit line string with 2-point best-fit line segments. Each line segment expects two pick points and will be adjusted to best fit the point cloud along the line. Each line segment will connect to the previous one as it is created.

Following are all possible keywords:

• Undo to undo last line segment or last pick input

• 1P to switch from 2-point fit mode to 1-point region grow mode

• 2P to switch from 1-point region grow mode to 2-point best-fit mode

• Sketch to skip best-fit for the next 2-pick line segment (one-time only)

• Close to close the line string and end the tool

• <return> to end the tool leaving the line string open

When you have flat walls with a clean point cloud the 1Point Polyline tool could extract almost all contours of your section automatically. You could also change some settings for better results by clicking the Auto-fit settings button.

One similar tool, which was added in the 2022 version is Floor Plan creation. After creating the Quick Slice click on the Floor Plan button to launch the tool. In the appeared window you will be presented with a series of tools to help you create your floor plan. They are very similar to the previous tools, but in the Floor Plan window, you can fit lines based not only on point clouds but also on auto-fitted lines:

• In the appeared window adjust the left slider to define the best size and position of your section

• Click the Find Walls button and you'll see a lot of lines on the screen, the result will be similar to auto-fit lines with native AutoCAD and BricsCAD tools.

• Next, click the Construct polyline button and connect line segments and fill in gaps to create polylines. Click on the red line segments or on the point cloud to connect them. They will become yellow.

• When you reach a gap, you can click on a wall to automatically fit a line to the point cloud.

• Clicking on an area of points and dragging will also try to create a best-fit segment along the drawn line.

• Clicking and dragging from an area with no points will manually create a line as drawn.

• Connected and drawn segments will try to grow automatically (if the Auto-Advance option is enabled) and will also refine as new segments are connected/created.

• With enabled Ortho Line mode, all corners will be 90 degrees angle

• After Ending or Closing the polyline, it will turn green. Green polylines may be selected and their endpoints can be adjusted to fine-tune your linework or to correct errors.

• Send to CAD: Pushes the finished polylines (shown as green lines) back to your current drawing/model and closes the tool. Any remaining red line segments will be discarded and ignored.

One of the main problems for all these automatic tools is that they try to fit a straight line to the point cloud section, but sometimes the wall could be not flat, and the wall line should be represented with more than just two vertexes. In this way, you can try to add more vertexes to the polyline with the Insert Pi tool (AeccInsertFeaturePI command):

• Select the line which should be modified, select the increment option and specify the distance between vertexes.

• Then run the Fit Section tool from the CloudWorx toolbar. The software will try to adjust each vertex to the section in the point cloud. The result will be not perfect but it could save a lot of time anyway.

• If you need to add vertex manually hover the mouse cursor over the middle snapping point of the line and click the A button on the keyboard.

After all the main walls will be finished add doors and windows, I recommend using dynamic blocks for that. They are available in AutoCAD and in BricsCAD. Dynamic blocks contain rules and restrictions that control the appearance and behavior of a block when it is inserted into a drawing or when it's later modified. You can add different visibilities modes for blocks and rules for auto aligning it according to the polyline. Below you could download a small example of that dynamic blocks.

If the majority of your work is creating similar 2D plans that contain only walls, doors, and windows, for space and elements calculating purposes then look at the PointFuse powered by JetStream software. It's one of the easiest and fastest software that got tools for classification point clouds, It allows you very fast to create walls and insert doors and windows, and convert them to 3D BIM models or 2D drawings.

If you need to create a facade drawing with a lot of details in most cases you'll be forced to draw them manually, but you could use additional tips and tricks to faster the processing:

• Use different tools to change the coordinate system. You are always forced to change it because in all software the drawings are created perpendicular to the Z axis. Use the Orientation tools on the CloudWorx panel to easily place the UCS, by the wall, by two points, by two walls and other methods. Save the UCS for easy and faster switching between them.

• Try different formats of the point cloud, all of them got different visibility modes. For RCP try to edit the transparency of your cloud. And enable Normals color mode it will highlight the main edges in the cloud.

• For LGS try to use silhouette mode and change colorization by elevation. In the color, settings specify in which direction you want to color point cloud, the number of colors, and the steps between them. It will give you a better understanding of the depth of your elements.

• Use split-screen mode for better understanding in which place you are generating sections and creating drawings.

• Use orthoimages, you can create them directly in your CAD with the CloudWorx plugin. Before generating the orthoimage left on the screen only relevant points and draw a rectangle around it, you could use it later for placement of your image. In the pop-up window specify desired resolution and path for generating it.

• Try to generate orthoimages with different color modes, later you could combine them in the image editing software and get very interesting results.

Now let's see what tools we can use in Cyclone 3DR for Scan to Plan purposes.

• Similarly, as in AutoCAD and BricsCAD, we can extract all lines from the section automatically. Select all the mesh(es) or cloud(s) on which you want to calculate sections and launch the Planar sections command. Define the axis for section, the position of sections, and the chaining distance. Click ok and you'll see all extracted lines on each level.

• Close polylines with Chain Polylines and Close Polyline tools

• Optimize extracted sections with Resample tool. This command allows you to resample polylines by choosing the desired number of points.

• For a rectangular section that was not extracted perfectly, use the Best Rectangle tool to extract the perfect shape. And convert it then to polyline with the Polyline from Geometry tool.

• Also, you could use Scan to Plan, this command creates thin slices from a point cloud which will be used to draw plans and elevations. The workflow is very similar to CloudWorx's Floor Plan tool. You can Draw polylines manually, Quick Draw in a semi-automatic way, and Extract for automatic extraction.

For extraction position of elements based on the wall use the Planar Countour command. The command allows extracting planar contours from meshes and clouds.

Segment manually extracted polyline to the rectangular and circle shapes

Use later extracted contours for placing the best circles and rectangles to them. Use Best Rectangle and Best Circle tools for that, and don't forget to choose to compute One shape per input to fit all objects together.

Sometimes you could have a task to visualize any object that has a very complex shape, but the customer doesn't require too much accuracy, all that he wants just have an approximate drawing of the object to understand the main dimensions for example. In that case, you could try a different combination of meshes and polylines. Let's have a look at a few examples:

1. The old forged metal fence. It has a lot of elements, and all of them got the complex shape

• First of all, try to clean the point cloud with the Noise point cloud filter. Adjust the slider and the 3DR will highlight the sparse points inside the cloud. Click the Ok button and they will be automatically deleted.

• Create a simple plane object, you could use Region Grow, Best fit commands, or just draw it manually. And convert it to the mesh with the Mesh from Geometry tool.

• Project point cloud to the mesh. Use the Projection tool for that.

• For accurate polylines detection, we need to have a small size of triangles in the mesh. So you could use the subdivide tool. In the preferences menu for that tool just specify the maximum edge of the triangle and click the Ok button.

• Next, compare the point cloud and mesh to each other. Select the mesh as the object for colorization. And then segment the mesh by Inspection.

• Delete the non-fence part of the mesh and ungroup the rest of the mesh. Now you can keep only the largest parts and remove or hide all the rest.

• You can improve the borders of that mesh with the Smooth Border tools, it will give you a better shape of the polyline. Or extract the polyline as it is with the Extract All Holes and Borders tool and next smooth the polyline.

This approach may not give an ideal result, but it is not bad and suitable for a variety of tasks. This polyline can be easily exported to CAD and you can customize the final drawing as you wish.

2. One more unusual example of using 3DR for creating drawings based on the 3D mesh it is extracting lines based on its slopes. Let's take the Victory sample as an example. You could find it in the samples folder that is installed with the 3DR by default. Or you could download it by clicking the below button.

• Select point cloud and create the model with Mesh in two steps method. You could use the same settings as I did.

• Define the view that you want to be used later in your CAD for creating final drawings. Let's set the Front view

• Segment visible triangles from all others. Use the Manual Clean Separate tool for that and set Only Visible mode for selecting the triangles.

• Slope analysis creating based on the Z axis so rotate the segmented mesh to be sure that its position is relevant to the top view.

• Select the segmented mesh and click the Extract Polyline / All Holes And Borders. Next, smooth the extracted contour with the Smooth Polyline tool.

• Make the Slope Analysis and define the color map as you wish. I'm trying to highlight areas that I want to be extracted.

• Extract some lines with the Localize Values tool and separate the analyzed mesh by the inspection steps.

• Extract all required polylines from segmented meshes with the All Holes and Borders tool

• Send all lines to AutoCAD with a single button.

Don't forget that in the Cyclone 3DR you also could create high-resolution orthoimages with different colorization modes and next blend them into any image editing software for getting unique results. All the above tools will not do all work for you, but they could significantly increase the speed of processing the data and make your life much easier.