CloudCompare forum

Does Global shift only work when importing text files, instead of importing PLY files ? I don't get prompted to global shift the points with PLY files.

As well, I think I may have saw a video on this in which you can create splines from the mesh which I assume you then import into a CAD program for lofting etc ?

It depends on the version, but with recent versions of CC all file formats that can contain large coordinate should lead CC to suggest to apply a Global Shift. It is possible that the file is encoded with 32bits floating point values already, and thus CC won't bother applying a Global Shift since the loss of information would have already occurred.

And you can export sections of a mesh as polylines (with the Cross Section tool, or the Section extraction tool - see https://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/i ... gmentation), and then export that to DXF for instance. But not splines.