CloudCompare Update List Message

 
From: "CloudCompare Update List" <cloudcompare@PROTECTED>
Date: July 21st 2014
Dear CloudCompare enthusiasts,

A new version has been released. You'll find it here:
Once again, many thanks to all our supporters who made donations on pledgie!
Click here to lend your support to: CloudCompare and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !
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
Color Levels Dialog
  • 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)
  • Enhancements:
    • Histogram display enhanced with the QCustomPlot library
new histogram
    • 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
cc_new_sf_display_params_editor
    • 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
new color props
    • 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
new align dialog
    • 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).
new Global Shift & Scale dialog
    • '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
new arithmetic ops
    • 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...
Display options

    • 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)
3D connexion devices
    • '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:


And last but not least, you can make donations to the project via'Pledgie':
Click here to lend your support to: CloudCompare and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

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
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