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Converting a point cloud of a substation to a mesh

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2025 5:24 pm
by liamoleary19
Full disclosure, my experience with CloudCompare (or any other point cloud software) is very limited.

I am attempting to convert the point cloud I have of a segment of a substation into a mesh to use in ArcGIS Pro using the Poisson Recon plugin. The resulting mesh is very poor quality - likely due to the complex nature of the object and the software's way of triangulating this (photo attached). My Octree depth is set to 10, and output density as SF is checked. When computing the normals, I have set a higher radius of 0.765 and a +Z orientation.

Wondering if there is anyone else here who has experience dealing with these types of meshes, and if there is any settings I can change (or perhaps a different workflow to follow) to make the end result better?

Thanks in advance!

Re: Converting a point cloud of a substation to a mesh

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2025 9:05 am
by daniel
I doubt settings a default orientation of +Z would work for this cloud (assuming the things I can see protruding at the bottom are part of the cloud?). Having properly oriented normals is paramount for the Poisson Reconstruction plugin.

Re: Converting a point cloud of a substation to a mesh

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2025 6:46 pm
by liamoleary19
Hi Daniel,

Yes, the bottom part is also the cloud. The smooth, almost blanket-like surface towards the top is not supposed to be there - the mesh is a series of poles/steel towers.

Do you have any idea which orientation would work best? I chose +Z solely based off a YouTube tutorial.

Thanks,

Liam

Re: Converting a point cloud of a substation to a mesh

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2025 12:33 pm
by daniel
If it's real 3D, then only the advanced Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm might work. But that can be very tricky...