Scan size is reduced once combined

[pedropcsena]

Hi Daniel,

I watched your webinar last month and it was really helpful, thanks for that!

I am importing 25 .fls files from a FARO scanner, each scan has about 140mb. They are imported with no problem, it is taking a bit of time, my PC is a i7-6820HQ, 32Gb of RAM, and a NVIDIA QUadro m2000M. In order to work with the cloud I am subsampling. Is it normal or there might be something with my PC?

Second question, when I merge the 25 scans, it merges with no problem, but when I save the file, the file has a reduced size. At first I was saving the merged cloud as .bin, but then an error occurs every time I try to open. Then I saved all the scans in .pts, but I noticed that the size of the file gets reduced every time I save it. How do I fix this? Or what is the best way of merge these 25 scans in one file?

Thanks,

Pedro

[daniel]

The issue with the BIN files becoming corrupted when too many points are saved in one file is interesting because it happened to another user recently.

Sadly I haven't been able to reproduce this on my side. Hopefully we'll find a solution soon.

Otherwise, when you save to the PTS format, be sure to set a high enough 'coordinates precision'. Otherwise you may lose precision each time you save, and it may be the cause of your issue (as PTS files are actually text files, so their size is directly related to the number of digits used for each coordinate).

Last but not least, are you testing all this with the latest 2.8 beta release?

[pedropcsena]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the reply, I am actually using version 2.7, will download 2.8 now.
And yeah, I noticed every time I save it, the file size is reduced. How do I set coordinate precision before saving it?

Thanks,

Pedro

[daniel]

When you save an ASCII (PTS) file, you have a 'coordinates precision' field in the ASCII export dialog.

But hopefully with the latest 2.8 beta version you should also be able to save the cloud(s) as BIN files without error (hopefully ;) ).

[pedropcsena]

Thanks Daniel. I will be trying it tonight. One more question, since my files are .fls, which precision should I use it to keep the file at the same size?

[daniel]

Hard to tell, it depends on the coordinate system you use. Generally 8 is sufficient, but if you want to be sure that there's no loss of precision, you can increase it to 12.