Well, I'm back in the office for a couple of days after a week on the road. I've had some time to take a look at the point cloud object in the Civil 3D and Map 3D Subscription Advantage Pack.
An increasing amount of ground data is being represented by lidar surveys. We've all been in the situation where we have to generate a TIN based on a large (> 2 million) points and we've all run into the problems associated with trying to do that. Things have improved with the surface simplification commands and the data clip boundary, but we've been hoping for a solution that will let us build a surface from large data sets without a lot of data manipulation. So, do we have a new tool with the point cloud object? Well, not quite.
What the point cloud object allows us to do is take a substantial number of points (I think up to about 2 billion) and represent them accurately as an object within Civil 3D and Map 3D. This has obvious advantages for adding 3D representations of surfaces, vegetation, buildings and other structures from scanned surveys. The points are held in a data base and can be updated and modified as new surveys become available. The point cloud can be stylized based on criteria such as elevation or point classification, and the database can be used in multiple drawings and applications throughout the design, construction and maintenance process. Think BIM.
What the point cloud object doesn't do in the Civil 3D installation is allow us to create a surface of any kind. It would be nice to make a TIN from the cloud, but we can't. Maybe in the next release. To see a surface created from the point cloud, we need to use Map 3D. That functionality doesn't exist within Map in the Civil 3D product. Here's a point cloud in Civil 3D.
This cloud has been stylized with an elevation range. Here's the same cloud shown as a surface in Map 3D.
You can also add a contour layer.
Now, all of this won't get you a TIN surface, but you can use the drawing you created in Map as a drawing in Civil 3D and overlay the point cloud or add additional cloud data such as buildings or other surveys. Here's the surface with the point cloud in Civil 3D.
There are couple of other things to note about this object. It seems to be a bit fragile when viewing it in 3D, either in Orbit or the Object Viewer. I've heard other people have experienced the same instability and crashes, as I have. To be fair, I'm not sure if it's the application or my video setup. I'll have to look into that a bit more. It can also be a bit slow to respond.
So, while I'm disappointed that we don't have an easier way of generating TINs from lidar and other large data sets, I'm impressed with what Autodesk has done with the Ambercore engine so far.
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