Software for Creating Contours on huge Point clouds

[mrafiei]

Hi every one
Which software do you prefer to create contours on very dense and huge point clouds?
I have Autocad Civil 2009, but it did not read lot of point clouds (10 million or more), and another problem that I have is softness of the contours. My contours are not soft and it is very bad to show (like noisy).
please help me.
thanks.

[bigben]

Possibly CloudCompare: http://www.danielgm.net/cc/doc/qCC/CloudCompare_cross_section_tool_V2.pdf

GlobalMapper

[James]

We use surfer. Don't often try million+ point datasets, but the website says it can handle maps with 2 billion nodes, so 10 million input points should be easy!

http://www.goldensoftware.com/products/surfer

[mrafiei]

Thanks to bigben and James.
I tried cloud compare, it is very powerful, but it just read 128 million points. 
furthermore I tried surfer, but it is work very bad with huge number of points. (with a system with 8gig of Ram)
 
And my another question.
Which software can handle  over 200 million points to reducing the number of points?

[chrisd]

You could try Daylon Graphics Leveller http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller.php

It can handle large numbers of points, and generate the contours. Not sure if it will work for you, but it is worth a try.

It only works with heightfields, where each location can have only one Z value. Also, it rasterizes the data to produce points that have equal X and Y spacing.

[James]

3DReshaper is good for many things including contours and pointcloud decimation but its main thing is surface reconstruction.

It has an option for reducing point cloud density on import - for example it recommends reducing to between 5 and 20 million points for machines with 2GB ram - so you can work with much larger clouds, but downsampling to something manageable based on your hardware.

The software is ~4000-6000 EUR i believe, we got ours a few years ago.

The other software i have direct experience of is Leica Cyclone, which also has features for contours and density reduction, and is similarly priced.

Both softwares would probably be overkill if all you want to do is contours and density reduction , but you would certainly find many other uses for them in time!

[James]

I'm still using surfer 8, but I suspect it might not recognise binary formats, so ascii ply could work although the headers are large/awkward compared to something completely generic like txt/xyz which is just a list of numbers!

[Arie]

You could try to run cloudcompare from commandline to subsample the pointcloud. Works like a charm, also with larger datasets.
Cheers!