General

Why does Pointools not run on my computer?

Please check that your computer satisfies the minimum requirements to run Pointools View. If it does and you experience a crash on startup please update your graphics card drivers. This fixes this issue in most cases. If you still cannot run Pointools please send a query via the support form

We have identified an issue that causes Pointools View to not run on some 32 bit AMD processors. This should be fixed in the next release.

Point Clouds

Pointools is slow when very large LIDAR datasets

Pointools can handle very large LIDAR datasets very quickly, but care must be taken when setting options on import to acheive the best performance.

1 - Do not set the accuracy too high, typically LIDAR data has an accuracy of 10-15cm or at best 6-7cm. Setting accuracy too high can hit performance very badly. For most datasets 1cm works well.

2 - If you have tiled datasets with each tile of 10 million points or more, do not combine the data on import. This usually gives better results and also gives you the ability to turn tiles on and off.

Viewing

I can't see the data I've imported

Pointools zooms to view the data when it is first loaded. Sometimes this is clipped out by the clipping planes and a slight navigation movement is required to update the clipping planes positions and bring the data into view.

Note that not seeing anything in the viewport may also be caused by having the clip box enabled so that everything is clipped out of the view.

Tools

How does the clipbox work?

Click on the Clipbox adjust icon. This opens up the clipbox dialog.
If you cannot see the clipbox click the Extents button. This will expand the box to the extents of the data.
You can click and drag the handles to resize the box.
To enable clipping, click on the Enable Clipping icon in the Clip toolbar (the first one). This toggles clipping from being inactive to active and vise versa.

If you do not see any clipping happening this may be because:

1 - You do not have ARB_vertex_shader support in your graphics card

or more likely

2 - Your graphics card drivers need to be updated. These can be usually be downloaded from the graphics chipset manufacturers website.