Point Cloud Getting Started

Carlson Point Cloud (not to be confused with Carlson Coordinate Cloud) is an application designed to run alongside IntelliCAD or AutoCAD and offers processing tools for large point datasets. It provides several methods to reduce, clean, extract from, and manipulate Point Cloud datasets so that they can be processed within CAD software without the typical memory limitations found in CAD applications.

Carlson Point Cloud comes in two varieties - Basic and Advanced.

Point Cloud Basic – designed to work within a CAD environment to manipulate and extract data from a point cloud. It has a very large capacity (up to a billion points) and is a great program for performing a “virtual survey” directly in a cloud. It allows the creation of Carlson points and 3D polylines utilizing a typical Carlson Field to Finish code table (FLD file) and draws entities directly into an open CAD drawing with no additional export function. A notable feature is Survey by Grid which sets points at any specified grid spacing.

Point Cloud Advanced – contains all of the functionality of Carlson Point Cloud Basic plus the ability to extract features such as trees, hydrants and poles. It also allows the creation of solids and utilizes typical Carlson cross section alignments (mxs files) to extract cross sections and profiles. You can select cloud data by color or elevation and create regions for isolating portions of a cloud for editing or extracting features.. A notable feature is the ability to simplify a TIN and create smoother looking contour lines.

All actions performed in Point Cloud are initiated through the Point Cloud Project Manager. This manager can be brought up from your CAD application (assuming that the Point Cloud module is loaded) via the Point Clouds -> Point Cloud Project Manager menu option or with the PC_PROJECT_MANAGER command. Work in Point Cloud is arranged into projects and each project maintains a tree structure of all the data it contains. 

If you have not used Point Cloud before, you may want to go through the Point Cloud Step By Step Tutorial. 

If you need to activate one of the legacy engines you can do so in the Point Cloud Setup via the Point Clouds -> Point Cloud Setup menu option.  

Please view the Recommended Specifications.