Dear
CloudCompare
enthusiasts,
A new version has been released. You'll find it here:
- Windows
- Mac OS X:
- Linux:
- Sources:
Once again,
many thanks to all our supporters who made donations on pledgie!
Not many new methods
for this version 2.5.5 but a lot of improvements:
- New method: Edit
> Colors > Levels
- allows the user to edit the color histogram (either all
channels at once or channel by channel)
- works a
bit like the Photoshop's Levels command
- New method: 'Edit > Scalar field(s)
> Convert to random RGB'
- converts a
scalar field to random
RGB colors by mapping the scalar field values to a user defined number
of random colors (regularly sampled over the SF interval)
- New method: 'Display > Reset all GUI
elements positions'
- removes
all persistent
information about the position and state of GUI elements (so that the
GUI elements are back to their default on next start)
- Histogram display enhanced with the QCustomPlot
library
- New scalar-field display properties editor:
- sliders are replaced by interactors displayed over a
representation of the SF histogram
- round interactors are used to set the min and max
displayed values
- triangular interactors are used to set the min and max
saturation values
- Former 'Color'
and 'Scalar field'
visibility checkboxes in the entity 'Properties' dialog
have been merged:
- a unique combo-box now lets the user choose between no
color, RGB or SF colors
- Point-pair based alignment tool:
- minimum number of pairs set to 4 now (3 was not reliable enough)
- the error contribution of each point (pair) to the total
RMS is displayed in a new column (once the 'Align' button has
been pressed)
- a new button next to each point allows the user to
delete any point at any time
- the window rotation center can now be properly picked
on the aligned cloud after having clicked on the 'Align' button
- Point-pair based & ICP registration methods:
- the registration rotation can now be constrained around
one axis (X, Y or Z)
- the registration translation can now be constrained
along one or several dimensions (Tx, Ty or Tz)
- warning:
those constraints break some mathematical asumptions of the original
algorithms. Therefore the result might not always be optimal...
- Global Shift & Scale mechanism:
- brand new dialog (hopefully clearer)
- a 'global_shift_list_template.txt'
file can now be found next to CloudCompare's executable file. The user
can edit it and follow the instructions inside:
- this file should be renamed 'global_shift_list.txt'
- it can contain 5 values per line ("name; Tx; Ty; Tz;
scale;" - mind the
semicolon characters)
- all entries in this file will automatically be added
to the dedicated combo-box of the new dialog
- this should help a lot users who are always working
with the same global coordinate system(s).
- the 'Edit
> Edit global shift' and 'Edit > Edit global scale'
methods have been merged into a single method: 'Edit > Edit global shift
and scale'.
- It
uses approximately the same new dialog but the user can now choose if
the modification of the Shift & Scale parameters should impact
the
global coordinates system (i.e. at export time) or the local coordinate
system (in which case the cloud(s) will be translated and or/rescaled
automatically)
- this new method can be called on several clouds at
once
- when a transformation (applied with 'Edit > Apply
transformation')
causes the cloud coordinates to go overbounds, the same dialog appears
in order for the user to optionaly update the global Shift &
Scale
information instead of actually translating the cloud(s).
- 'Edit
> Scalar fields(s) > Arithmetic' method:
- New operations are now applicable on a single SF:
- square root (SQRT)
- power of 2 (POW2)
- power of 3 (POW3)
- exponential (EXP),
- natural logarithm (LOG)
- base 10 logarithm (LOG10)
- common trigonometric functions... (COS, SIN and TAN -
in radians)
- ...and their inverse (ACOS, ASIN and ATAN)
- As before this will create a new scalar field on the
same cloud
- Point clouds are now pre-loaded in the graphic card
memory if possible (via VBOs = Vertex Buffer Objects)
- this allows for much faster display on high end graphic
cards (up to 15 times!)
as long as there's no normals involved... (normals are too slow to display
whatever the case... use the qEDL shader instead ;)
- in case of problems this feature can be disabled in the
'Display Options'
dialog ('Other display
options' tab, 'Try
to load clouds on GPU for faster display' checkbox)
- this
feature is disabled by default on ATI cards due to negative feedbacks
from beta testers on MacOS and Linux (you can
still activate it via the 'Display Options' dialog... at your own risk).
- We'd
appreciate any feedback about this new feature though...
- ASCII files loading:
- the
dialog now handles the header line in a smarter way (the 'skip lines'
count is correctly updated, the extracted header is displayed, etc.)
- new command line option:
- use '-SKIP [number
of lines]' after '-O' to specify the number of lines that
should be skipped
- new mechanism to detect the column type based on the
header line (if any):
- when loading an ASCII file in CloudCompare this
should set the columns type automatically
- when loading an ASCII file from the command line this
should prevent the dialog from appearing (if standard names are used: X..,
Y.., Z.., Nx, Ny, Nz, Normx, Normy, Normz, R, Red, G, Green, B, Blue,
etc.)
- Bundler (.out)
import:
- big coordinates (for keypoints) are now properly
handled (with the Global
Shift & Scale mechanism)
- the
user can now input a 4x4 transformation matrix in order to change the
keypoints orientation before generating the orthophotos (i.e. this lets
fixing the proper Z axis)
- New option in the LAS file opening dialog: 'Force 8-bit colors'
- to cope with files in which colors are mistakenly coded
on 8 bits (instead of 16 bits as specified in the LAS standard!)
- The 'Poisson Surface Reconstruction' plugin (qPoissonRecon) is
now based on the version 5.71 of PoissonRecon
lib
- The 'Edit
> Translate/rotate' tool is now much more accurate:
- only double-precision matrices are used (before
that, especially when lots of rotations were applied to an entity, the
resulting transformation matrix could have had accumulated too many
numerical errors resulting in a slightly shrinked cloud)
- (Mac OS X) Fonts on "retina" displays are no longer fuzzy
- 3D mouse support: CloudCompare now relies on the official
3dConnexion SDK:
- wireless devices should now be handled correctly
- the option menu is replaced by the official/default one
- (support is still limited to Windows only for now)
- 'Default point size' editing dialog
- it is now displayed upon a semi-transparent
background so as to be always visible even when displayed over a green
entity
- (this dialog appears inside 3D views when the mouse
hovers their top-left corner)
- Non ascii characters in filenames (accents, etc.) are now
better handled by file some I/O filters:
- all
filters but PLY, OBJ (output only), STL (output only), FBX, DXF, GDAL
rasters, PCD (and older/internal formats such as POV, ICM, MA, depth
maps)
- Bug fixes:
- Loading only the keypoints from a Bundler file (without
the images)
would result in a corrupted import (wrong values were read)
- qPCL: bug solved in MLSsmoothing with colored clouds
- Memory leak fixed (when using sub-meshes, typically
coming from an OBJ file with multiples parts)
- The scalar fields generated by the 'Height Grid Generation'
tool were seen empty by CC
You'll also find the new ccViewer versions here:
- Windows
- Linux and Mac OS:
- same as of CloudCompare (see above)
And last but not least, you can make donations to
the project via'Pledgie':
Enjoy,
CloudCompare Admin
PS: if you can't read properly this message, you can read it
here: http://www.cloudcompare.org/release/notes/20140721/cc_release_notes_20140721.html
