VisionLidar - Tutorial - Creating and exporting a project

To begin, open up VisionLidar. The start-up screen will appear. To begin working with the software, the user may create a new project or open an existing project. If this is your first time using VisionLidar, you may not have any existing projects to open. Click on File / New project and the following window will appear. The software is requesting a project name, project location and a list of source files for the project. A few things to be noted here; the project location has a few restrictions on the naming - if your folder contains a space, you may notice that the project cannot be created. Edit the project location by clicking on the button next to the text space. Source files may be selecting by clicking on the corresponding button and selecting them in their folder. VisionLidar allows you to select any number of files of the same nature in a folder - for example; any LAS or LAZ file in a folder may be added to a project. If you wish to add files from separate folders into a project, you must move your files to the same folder before importing. You may view available file types by changing the type of file.. E57, PTS, etc. Select multiple files by clicking CTRL or Shift during selection. A maximum of 255 separate scans are allowed for importation. This limitation is due to the file format used. It is possible to create projects with more files - for this reason the checkboxes “all in folder” and “merge scans” were added; this way the user can select only the first file in the folder and every file in the folder will be added to the project. Compute normals: This option will calculate the normals upon project creation. This means that the project creation will be longer however it will not be necessary to compute normals later on. For the moment VisionLidar uses normals for viewing purposes. 3D file: this option, when checked, creates a horizontal and vertical tiling grid. If the option isn’t checked, the tiling grid will only be horizontal. This option can be more efficient for aerial type data where there isn’t much Z movement, however, it is not recommended for mobile or terrestrial type-data. Tile size, max points per tile: these options determine the size of the tiles used. Normally, the more points a tile contains the better the visualization - however it may slow down the computer when moving around in the point cloud. Fewer points per tile will make a more fluid visualization but will display less points at a time. The default value for max points per tile is 5000 but the user may modify this for a different tiling. The size of the tiles cannot be modified after the project has been created. Limit by bounding box: This option can be used to limit the importation to a specified area. The coordinates of the bounding box must be known before the project is created. Any points outside of the bounding box will not be considered in the project creation. Once the project is created, the point cloud should appear on screen. The title bar shows the project location. The explorer has tabs showing a list of classes, a list of scans and a list of objects in the project. If the point cloud is not visible, it may be because the point cloud is out of view. To show all points you can click on the “Zoom extents” icon or press the spacebar, click the “Show all hidden” option or change the background color for a better contrast. Exporting Exports only visible points Points may be hidden by the fence tool In an extraction Separate class Separate scan Exports point cloud to 1 single file Exports point cloud according to number of scans Export to Potree formats 1.4RC or 1.5RC