Cleaning a Point Cloud & Creating a Ground Surface

[@joancao1334]

It's a long video but it really worth the time! I learned a lot of tools that I can use, not especially for creating a ground surface, but during your explaination, I realized that I can use them in my project too. You also shared the experience of parameters tunning with us, which saves me much time! Before this video, I was still manually segment the noise point out or using the simple sor filter. I've learned a lot! Thanks for the contribution!

[@aretemyburgh3021]

Great video! Learned so much. Will certainly improve my c3d workflow. I never use kriging filter when creating surfaces from pointclouds, it just smoothes too much and you loose to much detail. FYI 2025 c3d now only updates mms files when there is a change and not everytime something changes in your drawing or you save. #subscribed and #followed

[@thomastucker301]

Great video! What does creating a surface in C3D with the point cloud do to the size of that cad file? I used a point cloud in TBC to create a surface with 0.5' spacing on points and brought the triangles in as 3D faces in C3D to create a surface. This made the CAD file itself much larger than our typical topo surfaces and would cause issues on our engineers computers downstream due to less processing power than our survey computers.

[@The3rdDimensionSurveying]

Great question, it will absolutely create a bigger file. The denser the data, the larger the file. Once a surface becomes too heavy C3D will separate it from the DWG via a MMS file to allow the DWG to remain relatively light weight. If you're dealing with large surfaces bogging down your C3D drawing, what I usually do is create a separate drawing to house my surfaces for that projects and use C3D's data shortcuts tool to point to those separate drawings to gather the surface information. I've found it pretty effective but there are a bunch of other ways to tackle that problem too.

[@thomastucker301]

@@The3rdDimensionSurveying Awesome I will look at trying that method out. Appreciate the response! I've been taking a ton of information away from all your videos. Thank you for taking the time to make them.

[@amirfarshadfar8687]

Hi, thanks for your responses and guidance. I have a question. I followed all of the steps and finally when I wanted to save the data in the “las” format, in the “las/laz scale” window the “original resolution” is inactive and I have just the other two options “optimal resolution” and the “custom resolution” active, although in your video you chose the “original resolution”. Why is this happened for me and it is inactive? Does it effect if I choose the other two options on my results? Thanks for your response, Best regards, Amir Farshadfar

[@sylvaingiroux9741]

Did you create the pointcloud in Agisoft?

[@The3rdDimensionSurveying]

I did

[@sylvaingiroux9741]

@@The3rdDimensionSurveying do you find CC better at classifying ground points?

[@The3rdDimensionSurveying]

@@sylvaingiroux9741 My preferred method is the one I highlighted in this video but I'm always open to suggestions if there is a better way out there.

[@sylvaingiroux9741]

@@The3rdDimensionSurveying cool thanks for the reply. And thanks for your great videos. They help a ton. I’m still new at this. Was using cloud compare and recently got metashape pro. I seem to be have troubles when importing my GCPs and use them for to optimize my cameras, my camera accuracies drop to 15m not sure what the heck I’m doing wrong. I’m using a Mavic 3E

[@murreasy]

Bravo!!

[@hasstme2009]

I just find this useful video i install cloud compare sw and follow the steps but the option CSF filter is not active so any one can advise how to make it it active(I do not have Civil3D)

[@The3rdDimensionSurveying]

You need to highlight the point cloud in the file tree first

[@nikouer]

do you work in meters?

[@The3rdDimensionSurveying]

Sometimes, others in feet. It depends on the project.

[@nikouer]

@@The3rdDimensionSurveying I mean in this video. To understand what 0.1 is.

[@The3rdDimensionSurveying]

This dataset was in meters.

[@amirfarshadfar8687]

Dear Thanks so much for your video and guidance. I have a question and I do not know if you can help or not. I used the CloudCompare software to import my drone data as the point cloud data and exported them into the ReCap software to create the rcp file format and then attached them into the Civil 3D software to import my data and used the “create surface” to create a surface using the “kriging” method and also the “NoFilter” option to create another surface and followed your video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/h3rai5uipLl-m9U to create a “TIN volume surface” to compare my “kriging” and “NoFilter” surfaces with each others, like the mentioned video with the colored TIN volume surface, but when I adjusted the options like you, it showed me a surface many meters far from my data on the down of the my survey data! Could you please guide me what should I do and what is the problem? How should I solve it? Thanks for your guidance I look forward to hearing from you Sincerely Amir Farshadfar

[@The3rdDimensionSurveying]

I've never seen the surface creation filtering method shift a surface before which is what I think you are describing. It would be possible to see pockets of displacement between surfaces if there were holes in the point cloud based on filtering methods. If you send me a link containing your data I could take a look at it.

[@amirfarshadfar8687]

@@The3rdDimensionSurveying How could I send the file for you? Do you have email address?