Could use some guidance/advice from experts working with very large LIDAR scans

[jenkinsm]

Hi everyone,

I've been using Metashape for a few years and have gotten pretty comfortable with it for photogrammetry, but my current job also uses Leica RTC360 to capture LIDAR point clouds in addition to drone and DSLR photogrammetry. I have read through the Metashape documentation for working with LIDAR point clouds in Metashape, but it seems to be the case that once I import a large number of point clouds into Metashape, the GUI becomes unbearably slow and unresponsive.

I'm not sure if this is simply due to the size of the individual point clouds, or the total number of points from all combined clouds, or if it's something more problematic like corrupted data inside the point clouds (perhaps the HDR images are too large or corrupted? I really don't know).

So my first question to those who have a lot of experience with LIDAR in Metashape: is there a practical limit to the number of LIDAR points that Metashape can handle?

Also, how exactly does Metashape create meshes from the combined LIDAR + Depth Maps data? Are there any secrets to getting the cleanest, highest resolution mesh from the combined data sources?

Any advice or tutorials specific to large LIDAR projects in Metashape are welcome. Thanks in advance!