CloudCompare Release Notes (2024/02/14)

Dear CloudCompare enthusiasts,

A new version has been released! You'll find it here:

CloudCompare 2.13.0
installer version

CloudCompare 2.13.0
7z archive version

ccViewer 1.41
7z archive version

Windows 64 bits
(unified: stereo and non-stereo displays)

Mac OS 64 bits (Apple silicon)

kindly generated and hosted by Paul Rascle

Linux 64 bits

flathub packages are availble for Linux.
[Flathub] type "flatpak install flathub org.cloudcompare.CloudCompare"

Sources

git repository: https://github.com/CloudCompare/CloudCompare/releases/tag/v2.13
(for compilation instructions, refer to the BUILD.md file)

The wiki documentation is also the only reliable documentation and (almost) up-to-date!

Your support is greatly appreciated. Many thanks to all our supporters who made donations

The 2.13.0 Kharkiv version is finally ready!

After a year and a half, here is the latest and greatest version with once again a huge list of improvements, new features and new plugins!

As usual, let me thank all our backers! Your support is really appreciated. CloudCompare is not "free". Downloading and using CloudCompare can be done freely and free of charge... but developping and maintaining it is definitely not free! Open source projects can't live without active support from the community.

Here are the new menu features:

New menu entry: Save project

'File > Save project' (shortcut: CTRL+SHIFT+S)
saves all entities in the DB at once, as a .bin file

Tools > Fit > circle

fits a 2D circle on a 3D point cloud (thanks to https://github.com/truebelief)
works also on cylinders

Edit > Normals > Set SF(s) as normal

also accessible via 'Edit > Scalar fields > Set SF(s) as normal'
allows to set normals from scalar fields (or 0s or 1s)

New feature to "Draw normals as lines"

available in the cloud properties, whenever a cloud has some normals
option to set the length of the normals
option to choose the color of the normals

Edit > Normals > Shift points along normals

to shift the points of acloud of a given quantity along their associated normal

New display feature: near and far clipping planes in 3D views

extension of the previously existing feature to set a near clipping plane
can be enabled and modified in the Camera Parameters dialog or via CTRL+mouse wheel (near) or CTRL+SHIFT+mouse wheel (far)
note that the user shall now input actual distances and not percentages
works for all projection modes (orthographic and perspective)
does not modify the rendering quality of the EDL or SSAO shaders
taken into account when using interactive segmentation or point picking
not compatible with the Cross Section tool

New 'Display > Display settings' options:

Restore window geometry on startup
- option to control whether the previous window geometry (size and position) should be restored or not
Picking cursor

'Cross' or 'Pointing hand'
default mouse cursor for picking points will now be the cross

New default color ramp: Cividis

to flatten the perceptual delta perceived by people with color vision deficiency, and to prevent loss of information when printing in black and white
see https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.01662.pdf (and thanks to Louis Gagnon)

Here are the new plugins:

New unified plugin to load LAS files (by Thomas Montaigu)

based on LASzip
works on all platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS)
manages all versions of LAS files (up to 1.4)
gives much more control over extended fields (EVLR) as well as custom mapping between the existing fields of a cloud and their destination in the LAS file

q3DMASC

3DMASC is an advanced plugin for 3D point cloud classification, that uses Multiple Attributes, Scales and Clouds.
It is possible to use it with the GUI but also to call it with the command line
See https://lidar.univ-rennes.fr/en/3dmasc

qTreeIso

a 3D graph-based individual-tree isolator (treeiso) from Terrestrial Laser Scanning point clouds
by Zhouxin Xi and Chris Hopkinson, Artemis Lab, Department of Geography & Environment, University of Lethbridge (Canada)

3DFin (3D Forest Inventory)

automatic computation of tree parameters in terrestrial point clouds
accessible via the Python plugin (check the option to install it via the Windows installer)
see https://github.com/3DFin/3DFin
developed at the Centre of Wildfire Research of Swansea University (UK) in collaboration with the Research Institute of Biodiversity (CSIC, Spain) and the Department of Mining Exploitation of the University of Oviedo (Spain)

For the command line fans, a lot of new options have been added!

-SF_ADD_ID

allows to add the index of the point as a scalar field

-FLIP_TRI

to flip the order of the triangle vertices

-SF_OP_SF

to compute an arithmetic operation between two scalar fields (add, sub, mult, div)

-SF_INTERP

to interpolate a scalar field from one cloud to another cloud

-SF_ADD_CONST

to add a constant scalar field to a cloud

-SF_TO_COORD

to set the values of a scalar field as the X, Y or Z coordinates

-COLOR_INTERP

to interpolate the colors from one cloud to another cloud

-CLEVELS

to edit the color bands histogram of a cloud or a mesh (https://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/index.php/Colors%5CLevels)

-RDP

removes duplicate points of all loaded clouds

-DEBUG

display various pieces of information to help one debug and tweak the command line

-RENAME_ENTITIES

rename all loaded entities

-COMMAND_FILE

allows to apply commands in a separate file (with comments, multiple lines, etc.)

-SET_GLOBAL_SHIFT

to modify or remove the Global Shift of entities after they have been loaded

-SELECT_ENTITIES

to (temporarily) select a subset of entities on which to apply the next commands

-REMOVE_SENSORS

removes all sensors

-VERBOSITY [0-4]

to set the log verbosity level (0: verbose, 1: standard, 2: important, 3: warnings and errors only, 4: errors only)
to hide plugin loading logs, it should be set as first argument (even before -SILENT, in which case -SILENT can be the second argument)

See the update wiki page for more details (https://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/index.php/Command_line_mode)

We also have a huge list of improvements:

Edit > Translate/Rotate:

option to rotate/translate entities by a small increment, with buttons or using left/right arrows

see the 'advanced' section

thanks to Lighpoint Scientific

Gamepad support

ccViewer now supports gamepads
CloudCompare should now properly detect gamepads on Windows

The 3D display can now be rendered to a file even with 'Anaglyph' (Red/Blue) stereo mode enabled

works with 'Display > Render to file'
works with the 'Animation' plugin

Tools > Projection > Unroll

it is now possible to set any 3D axis for the cylinder or the cone
the cone projection type is now set in a separate combo-box to make things clearer
cone projection methods are now 'Conical', 'Cylindrical (fixed radius)' and 'Cylindrical (adaptive radius)'
the conical projection method now takes an additional 'span ratio' parameter as input (to reduce or increase the conical projection angular span)
new button to flip the 3D axis
ability to paste the axis and the axis point from the clipboard (3 numerical values separated by whitespaces, commas or semicolons)
option to choose an existing cylinder or cone entity in the DB tree, and use it to set the unrolling parameters
option to output the unrolled cloud in an arbitrary coordinate system (X: unroll angle / Y = distance to primitive / Z = longitude)

Edit > Apply Transformation

new shortcut buttons to set the rotation axis to I(1,0,0), J(0,1,0) or K(0,0,1)
new option (checkbox): 'Apply to global coordinates'

this allows to apply the transformation matrix to the original Global coordinates instead of the local ones (useful to georeference a cloud with a known transformation)

new tab to define the transformation as a rotation from a vector to another one (+ a translation)
ability to paste the axes, triplet of angles and translation vectors from the clipboard (3 numerical values separated by whitespaces, commas or semicolons)
the tool now tries to handle rotation scaling separately (with a dedicated field, assuming it's the same scaling for all dimensions)

Edit > Multiply/scale

when using a negative scale on a point cloud, the normals will now be inverted accordingly

Edit > Scalar fields > Set SF as coordinate(s)

if a single entity is selected (cloud or mesh), a new dialog will appear, that lets the user choose different scalar fields for each dimension (or a constant value - 0 or 1 - or a pass-through option).
the dialog is similar to the new 'Set SF(s) as normal' tool

Edit > Waveform > 2D Waveform viewer

the point which waveform is edited is now spotted in the 3D view and information is displayed as in with the picking tool

Multi-threading

If possible, CC will now try to use less threads/cores than the maximum number, so as to let the application breath (warning: some dialogs may keep the previous value as it's stored in the system registry)

Segmentation

CC will now preserve some children entities (labels, sensors, etc.) when segmenting clouds or meshes:

interactive segmentation tool, cross section tool (for clouds only), subsampling, filter by SF value, etc.

Interactive segmentation tool ('scissors' tool)

new button in the toolbar to export the current selection as a new cloud or mesh (without having to close the tool)
shortcut: E (for 'Export')
the user can now configure the name suffix for the 'remaining' and 'segmented' cloud
the display should be faster until the first segmentation is performed
for meshes: unused mesh vertices should now be properly removed from both the segmented and the remaining mesh parts
polygon mode: one can use ALT+left click to remove the last vertex

Rasterize

new option to fill the empty cells with Kriging
various improvements and glitch fixes
better naming of the scalar fields generated by the tool when exporting the grid to a cloud (with statistics)
if a scalar field projection option is chosen, all SF and colors will be projected at once so that all layers are valid right away (no need to 'update' the grid several times)
new projection options (inside each cell)

Median

Inverse variance

statistics can now be computed on the altitudes and/or all scalar fields
new statistics:

number of unique values inside a cell
median
percentile (with custom percentage)

new command line sub-options (see below)
when exporting Geotiff files, CC will now use NaN as the value for invalid pixels (no data)

Raster file format:

when loading a raster file, CC should now be able to detect the Z band more robustly (even if it's labeled as 'grey indexes' by GDAL)

Edit > Color > Set unique / Edit > Color > Colorize

CC will now remember the last input color

Global Shift

the suggested global shift will now be rounded to the nearest thousand (so as to suggest values in kilometers, easier to manage)

PoissonRecon plugin

the user can now choose the number of threads

Edit > Cloud > Paste from clipboard

the shortcut has been changed to ALT+P (so as to not conflict with the already existing CTRL+P shortcut for the 'Trace polyline' tool)

Color scales / Color scale editor

it is now possible to override a custom label value by a text (in the custom labels definition field, add a text between double quotes, after the numerical value)

ASCII files

ability to load quaternion coordinates (qw, qx, qy and qz) that will be loaded as individual 'Coordinate System' objects

once 4 columns are assigned to one of the 4 quaternion components (w,x,y,z), the user can elect the display scale of the to-be-created 'Coordinate System' objects

the ASCII file loading dialog has been improved:

a 'reset all' button was added to reset all column roles at once

the dialog should be smarter when restoring the previously set configuration

the 'Apply All' button should now work for more than two files ;)

BIN files

CC is now able to create BIN files with the lowest version as possible (depending on the selected entities) so that the resulting file may potentially be opened by earlier versions

LAS files

the default shift for (GPS) time values is now rounded to the nearest 10^5 value
the shift value is now displayed as a property of the currently selected scalar field
the user can now set a custom shift for GPS time values
the 'tiling' option will now remember the last used parameters (destination folder, dimension and number of tiles)

E57 files

images are now saved internally as JPEG files (faster and smaller)
sensors associated to images should now be properly shifted if the associated cloud is shifted, or if they are not associated to a cloud
scan grids ('groupingByLine' scheme) will now be loaded by CloudCompare

this is useful to compute clean and fast normals (note that they are still not exported)

PCD files

better management of PCD files with large coordinates (the Global Shift & Scale dialog will appear)
at export time, if the previous sensor is too far from the points, it might not be saved to preserve numerical accuracy (the previous sensor will be replaced by a default one positioned accordingly to the Global shift)

STP files

the triangles of meshes tessellated from STEP files should now all be properly oriented
the linear deflection is asked only once when multiple files are loaded at the same time

PLY files

loading dialog: the scalar fields are now displayed in a 'list widget' in case there are too many to fit in the screen

Salome/.poly files

CC will now detect that the first and last vertices of a polyline are similar, and will automatically close the polyline

Edit > Subsample:

new option to set the number of randomly sampled points as a percentage

the dialog will now remember the previous settings (last method used, sampling value, etc.)

New operations in the SF Arithmetic tool

to get the minimum values between 2 scalar fields

to get the maximum values between 2 scalar fields

to set a constant value

to compute the absolute value

New entity picking mechanism

should hopefully solve most of the random issues with picking

Cloning

ability to clone images
ability to clone 2D labels
ability to clone 2D viewport labels
ability to clone viewport objects

EDL shader

contrast and rendering quality improved

PCV plugin

the number of rays and the context resolution can now be set to up to 65536

Camera sensor edition dialog

the user can now control whether the input 'center' is in the world C.S. or in the camera C.S. (or more exactly, it's the translation part of a 4x4 transformation matrix - which was the case by default in the previous versions)

GBL sensor edition dialog

CC will now remember the last parameters used to create a sensor (not to edit one though)

CSF plugin

the CSF filter can now be applied on multiple clouds at once (both in the GUI and the command line version)

qEllipser plugin

option to export the polyline (and its major and minor axes) as polylines

Animation plugin

option to export the trajectory as a polyline

the plugin will now restore the custom light position (and activation state) if the viewports are saved with this version of CloudCompare. This allows to render animations of still objects but with a moving light source for instance.

the computed registration transformation will now be applied to the aligned entity and all its children (if any)

Align (point-air based registration):

when using a reference entity having a defined Global Shift & Scale the registration matrix from the to-be-aligned local entity coordinate system to the reference entity global coordinate system will be output in the Console

the Align tool will now output the list of points used and the final distance between them in the Console

the Align tool will now show errors along X, Y and Z axes in dedicated columns.

ICP and Align tools:

when using a reference entity having a defined Global Shift & Scale the registration matrix from the to-be-aligned local entity coordinate system to the reference entity global coordinate system will be output in the Console

Edit > SF > Compute stat. params

some more basic statistics are displayed in the Console:

number of valid values
sum of all valid values
sum of squared values
average
RMS

Connected Components Extraction

the parameters are now semi-persistent (= maintained as long as CC is running)

Cloud-to-primitive distances

refreshed dialog

when launching the Cloud-to-mesh distance tool with a primitive as the 'mesh,' role CC will now suggest the user to use the Cloud-to-primitive distance tool instead

Display > Display settings

the default threshold to activate the LoD mechanism is now 50M. points

Entity properties

the 'Bounding Box dimensions' field will now also show the min and max coordinates

Command line improvements

logging should be more responsive (both in the standard console-based mode and the silent mode)
simple quotes should now be properly handled (and can be used to set output filenames or scalar field names with space characters)
most methods using scalar fields as input will now also accept the scalar field name (in lieu of the SF index)

use simple quotes if the scalar field name has spaces in it

it is now possible to pass -1 as index after -SET_ACTIVE_SF to disable the active SF
otherwise, the current/default active scalar field can now be designated by index '-1' with the following commands:

REMOVE_SF, SF_TO_COORD, SF_ARITHMETIC, SF_OP, SF_INTERP, RENAME_SF, ICP (USE_MODEL_SF_AS_WEIGHT/USE_DATA_SF_AS_WEIGHT)

the -SET_ACTIVE_SF command can now be applied to the loaded meshes
the -SF_COLOR_SCALE option now works on meshes (vertices) as well
the -FILTER_SF option now works on meshes as well
the -FILTER_SF option can now be used with the special values in any order

MIN / DISP_MIN / SAT_MIN / N_SIGMA_MIN / MAX / DISP_MAX / SAT_MAX / N_SIGMA_MAX

new sub-option for the -C2C_DIST and -C2M_DIST commands

-SPLIT_XY_Z to split the distance between the z component and the xy plane component

new sub-option for the -C2M_DIST command

-UNSIGNED to compute unsigned distances

new sub-options for the -APPLY_TRANS command

-APPLY_TO_GLOBAL {FORCE}

to apply the transformation to the global coordinate system instead of the local coordinate system

warning: the Global Shift might be automatically adjusted to preserve accuracy (and small local coordinates)

by default, the Global Shift won't be automatically adjusted if the local coordinates are already large. Use 'FORCE' after -APPLY_TO_GLOBAL to force CC to adjust the Global Shift in any case.

-INVERSE: to inverse the transformation matrix before applying it.

new sub-options for -SS command

-SS OCTREE NUMBER_OF_POINTS {number} to subsample with the highest octree level for which the resulting point count won't exceed the given number of points

-SS OCTREE NUMBER_OF_POINTS PERCENT {number} to calculate NUMBER_OF_POINTS from PERCENT. PERCENT should be a decimal number between 0 and 100.

-SS OCTREE CELL_SIZE {size} to deduce the octree level from the given cell size.

-SS RANDOM PERCENT {number} to calculate the number of sampled points from PERCENT. PERCENT should be a decimal number between 0 and 100.

-SS SPATIAL {fallback_step} USE_ACTIVE_SF {step_at_SF_min} {step_at_SF_max} to use spatial step interpolation on active scalar field (fallback step will be used if active SF has invalid values)

new sub-options for -ICP command

-SKIP_TX to skip translation along X axis

-SKIP_TY to skip translation along Y axis

-SKIP_TZ to skip translation along Z axis

And last but not least, here are the bug fixes:

PCD files: when transforming a cloud with a sensor (either manually, or via a registration tool, or via Edit > Apply Transformation) and then exporting the cloud to a PCD file, both the points AND the sensor were transformed, resulting in the PCD file coordinates to be in the wrong coordinate system (as if the transformation had been applied twice)
The QTextStream::pos method is slow and unreliable. This could cause some issue when loading ASCII files.
When creating a new 3D view, it was not possible to pick an entity displayed in it by clicking on it.
When clicking on an entity in a 3D view while holding CTRL, it was only possible to select it, not to deselect it if it was already selected.
When using the Align tool on an aligned entity with labels, the initial view point could be invalid
Zooming in and out or changing the FOV in bubble view mode was not working anymore
When pausing the graphical segmentation tool while a contour / polyline was started but not closed, the tool icons would not be clickable anymore (forcing the user to exit the tool with ESC)
The 'Point List Picking' tool was not transferring the Global Shift information when exporting the list of points as a polyline
Rasterize tool: interpolated scalar fields were not properly exported in geotiff files (the interpolated part was missing)
Registration tools (ICP and Point-pair based alignment)

the transformation filter mechanism would not let filter both translations and rotation at the same time
they could generate a sub-optimal translation if the rotation was constrained

With a lot of NaN values in a scalar field, the Edit > Scalar field > Compute Stat Params tool could show wrong abscissa values below the histogram and curve

note that the average, standard deviation, RMS and Chi2 distance values displayed either above the histogram or in the Console were correct)

When loading E57 files with large coordinates, and applying a Global Shift, the associated image sensors were not translated of the same Global Shift
The 'cartesian bounds' of E57 files saved by CC were expressed in the global coordinate system instead of the local one
When applying the viewport of a calibrated image (= image with an associated sensor), the camera f.o.v. was applied instead of a smarter value, taking the 3D view dimensions into account (resulting in a bad match between the 3D scene and the overlaid image)
The PCL plugin's 'MLS' tool dialog was broken
The CSF plugin command line could truncate the exported clouds filename if floating point values were present in this filename
The 'File > Save File' option could also truncate the cloud name when suggesting a default output filename
The colors of the 'Compute Stat. Params' histogram could be wrong if the associated color scale was 'absolute'
M3C2 plugin

the display was not always updated when M3C2 computation was done

some parameters were not properly restored when re-opening the plugin dialog (e.g. the 'normal source')

Extracting a single slice via the Contour extraction option of the 'Cross Section' tool would not work
Fix the Support for High DPI screens (4K) on Windows
OBJ files with symlinks (to the .mtl file) could not be properly loaded
The bottom left scale was not always correctly displayed when rendering the screen with a zoom > 1 (both in terms of width and position)
The Primitive Factory 'precision' field was not used
The command line -FEATURE now changes the cloud name so that if it is saved with -SAVE_CLOUDS later it will not overwrite the original cloud.
The Point Pair registration ('Align') or ICP tools could generate a sub-optimal translation if the rotation was constrained
The C2M distance could crash if forcing the octree level above 11 or 12 (which would likely require a grid of more than 2 billion cells)
Translating or rotating the cloud while the LoD structure was being built could lead to a hang or a crash of CC

Other news around CloudCompare:

The side project CloudCompy (to use CloudCompare capabilities in a Python environment) is still growing thanks to the support of Paul Rascle
The number of tutorial videos made by users on Youtube is also growing (almost 200 now!)

And now it's time to rant a little:

More and more companies are using the code of CloudCompare (under the GPL license) in their closed source software tools :(

while CloudCompare can be freely used for any purpose, the program itself cannot be redistributed without some constraints.
but more critically, the code of CloudCompare cannot be used in a closed source Software
even if the tool was to be freely distributed, this would be an infringement of the GPL license

During the last months, some users have helped us identify 3 closed-source projects that are relying on our code

the 3 projects are Chinese...
1 project has accepted to release their code publicly to comply with the license
the 2 other projects have ignored our warnings:

Goslam (not to be mistaken with Geoslam) and their Studio Flagship software
Geosun and their Point Cloud Catalyst Viewer

Be warned if you use these products that they are infringing the GPL license and disrespecting our work.

If you spot other closed-source programs that look a lot like CloudCompare, please warn us! (admin@cloudcompare.org)

Best wishes to all,

Daniel
CloudCompare admin

PS: if you can't read this message properly, you can read it here: http://www.cloudcompare.org/release/notes/20240214/index.html