Features
Everything in the application
The complete capability list, grouped the way the software is. Every licence includes all of it – there are no capability tiers.
Projects and workspace
A project is a persistent structure, not a temporary session. What you organise stays organised.
- Create named projects in a configurable project folder, and reopen recent ones
- Save a project under a new name with Save Project As
- Work on several open projects at once in a tabbed interface
- Import additional datasets as subsets of an existing project
- Import by file picker, Windows drag-and-drop, or file association from Explorer
- Persistent hierarchy for subsets, E57 scans and images, sections, section results, measurements, measurement groups and meshes
- Project information, properties, file provenance, source format, coordinate information and point statistics
- Search and filter the Scene Explorer hierarchy
- Expand, collapse, activate, deactivate, show or hide content individually or in bulk
- Sections and measurements preserved between sessions
- Recent-file tracking that validates entries still exist
- Single-instance behaviour, so opening a file from Explorer goes to the running application
- Unsaved-change and close safeguards
- Integrated logs, with progress and cancellation for long-running operations
Supported formats
Point clouds
- LAS, LAZ, E57 and PLY import, with E57 handled by a native stack
- Point attributes preserved and used where the source supplies them – coordinates, RGB, intensity, classification, return number and normals
- Automatic handling of source coordinate scale and offset
- Large-coordinate support through rebased rendering and coordinate-aware processing
- Source-aware normals, including recognition of usable PLY normals and optional computation when needed
E57 in particular
- Import files containing multiple scans, each represented in the Scene Explorer
- Activate, deactivate, show and hide scans independently
- Scan metadata preserved and exposed
- Embedded images imported and organised, with an integrated image viewer
- Independent management of image folders and image visibility
- Full-fidelity source retention where available
BIM reference data
- Import IFC models as reference geometry, tessellated for display
- Use IFC content in the shared 3D workspace for visual comparison and context
IFC is supported as a reference model for comparison and context. PointForge Pro does not author or edit IFC.
Large-project handling
Designed for very large and multi-billion-point project totals.
- 64-bit point-count architecture, for totals beyond conventional 32-bit limits
- Chunked and sliced GPU rendering, so a large total is not confined to one draw call
- Out-of-core project storage with chunk streaming
- Octree spatial organisation and level-of-detail rendering
- Camera-aware chunk loading and view-frustum culling
- Always-visible preview representation for fast orientation
- Configurable preview point budget and source sampling percentage
- GPU memory budgeting, cache management and resource-pressure handling
- Screen-space density level of detail, to cut overdraw while keeping visual coverage
- Option to load all chunks rather than only camera-selected ones
- Four render profiles – Fast, Balanced, High Quality and Ultra
- Built-in rendering benchmark
- Background processing with progress reporting and cancellation
Actual capacity depends on dataset structure, storage, RAM, GPU memory and the operation being run.
Viewing and navigation
- Interactive GPU-accelerated 3D viewport
- Perspective and orthographic projection, with adjustable perspective strength
- Standard top, bottom, front, back, left, right and isometric views
- One-click Zoom to Fit across all visible content
- Interactive view-orientation prism
- Orthographic grid overlay, with configurable major and minor lines, subdivisions, thickness, opacity, spacing behaviour, foreground rendering and spacing labels
- Mouse orbit, pan, zoom and point picking
- First-person fly navigation
- Adjustable point size, with optional depth-based sizing so near points draw larger
- Gradient or solid viewport backgrounds in configurable colours
- Independent visibility and active state for projects, subsets, scans, images, sections, measurements and meshes
- Exposure and saturation controls for inactive content, to keep a busy scene readable
- Hide the Scene Explorer and Properties panels to maximise the viewport
- Customisable keyboard shortcuts with conflict detection and reset
Navigation hardware
- 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse navigation
- OpenXR VR sessions for immersive exploration, with VR-specific rendering, preview and near-dense detail handling
- Sony DualSense first-person navigation – sticks, analog vertical movement, view shortcuts, projection and colour controls, and touchpad elevation and point-size adjustment
- Configurable DualSense deadzones, movement speed, look speed, vertical speed and axis inversion
- Live DualSense connection, input, frame-rate and diagnostic status
VR is optional and requires a compatible OpenXR runtime and headset.
Colour and attributes
- RGB source colour
- Intensity
- Elevation RGB colour ramp
- Elevation scalar
- Classification
- Return number
- Point spacing
- X-ray density visualisation, with black and white levels, gamma, strength, automatic strength, curve controls and inversion
- Attribute histograms and range controls for supported modes
- Elevation range filtering and fine adjustment
- Per-project and per-subset colour and display control from the Properties panel
- Brightness, contrast, exposure, gamma, saturation and colour temperature, with apply and reset
Render quality
- Point-splat rendering with adjustable splat size
- Optional accumulation rendering that averages depth-compatible colours for smoother coverage
- Fast rendering mode while the camera is moving
- Adjustable accumulation blend radius, surface tolerance and footprint weighting
- Multisample anti-aliasing at 2×, 4×, 8× and 16×, plus FXAA
- Point-cloud lighting with ambient, diffuse, specular and shininess control
- Lighting presets – Default, Soft Studio, Dramatic and Outdoor
- Compute normals for lighting and surface analysis, and remove them when no longer needed
- Normal-colour and normal-vector visualisation
- Eye-dome lighting with radius and strength control
- Screen-space ambient occlusion with radius, strength and sample control
- Fine-grained advanced render and chunk settings for expert use
Scene Explorer
- Hierarchical project tree with categories for subsets, sections, measurements and meshes
- Multi-selection with context-sensitive operations
- Activate, deactivate, show and hide at project, category, source-group and item level
- Clear visual distinction between active, inactive, visible and hidden data
- Clone a subset, or merge subsets with optional merge metadata
- Rename subsets, measurements, measurement groups, sections and meshes
- Delete entities with confirmation and project-state update
- Registration status and source provenance shown in place
- Open mesh build logs and summaries from the tree
- Independent visibility for section planes, extracted points, generated lines, measurements and meshes
Selection
- Single-point, rectangular box, brush and polygon lasso selection
- Adjustable brush diameter, with dedicated add and remove modes
- Add with Shift, remove with Ctrl
- Select all visible points in the current view, invert, or clear
- Hide selected points without deleting them, and restore all hidden points
- Cut, copy and paste points via the clipboard
- Permanently delete selected points
- Visible-surface filtering for box, polygon and brush selection, keeping the camera-closest surface patch
- Configurable selection marker size, colour and soft or solid style
- Full-resolution selection with chunk-aware masks
Editing and transforms
- Move subsets interactively, or apply numeric shift and scale
- Rotate subsets clockwise or counter-clockwise
- Align data to the X, Y or Z axis
- Manual transform workflow
- Non-destructive edit-state tracking before bake
- Project and subset edit history, with undo and redo for supported operations
- Bake edits into project data when you are ready
- Reset registration transforms
- Clone before alternative processing, merge into a combined deliverable
Cleanup and optimisation
Resampling and reduction
- Downsample to a target spacing, percentage or point count
- Minimum-spacing downsampling and voxel-based reduction
- Feature-aware reduction using curvature scoring, to keep edges and corners
- Strict minimum-distance cleanup, and random or reservoir sampling
- Deterministic output modes for repeatable results
- Original-point-only output, to avoid synthetic centroids
- Anti-banding controls to reduce voxel-layer artefacts on planar surfaces
- Grid-origin dithering, grid rotation and two-pass multi-grid processing
- Pre-voxel reduction for faster work on large clouds
- Results created as new subsets, preserving the input
Noise and outliers
- Statistical Outlier Removal with neighbour-count and standard-deviation control
- Dynamic Statistical Outlier Removal for range-aware noise, with optional plane-aware filtering
- Preview before apply, for both
- Isolated-point and small-cluster cleanup, with preview
- Point-cloud smoothing with configurable processing controls
- Multi-subset targeting for supported workflows
- Progress, cancellation, validation and clear failure reporting
Registration
Align multiple subsets into a common coordinate frame, and see the numbers before you commit.
- Choose a fixed reference subset and one or more moving subsets
- Computed without modifying source data until results are applied
- Preview results before applying them
- Global initialisation with configurable voxel size and roll, pitch and yaw search ranges
- Coarse and fine angular search steps
- Candidate ranking, hypothesis limits, overlap thresholds and early-stop control
- Optional full sampling, and a configurable sampling limit
- Multi-threaded computation with a configurable thread count
- Centred-coordinate processing for numeric stability
- Multi-level refinement, with configurable correspondence distance and trim ratio
- Robust optimisation including Huber weighting and damping
- Rotation and translation stability limits, and convergence thresholds
- Normal-estimation and fallback control
- Acceptance thresholds on RMS error and overlap
- Per-subset result table – status, RMS, overlap, confidence, translation, rotation and messages
- Apply or reset registration transforms
Registration reports RMS, overlap and confidence so you can judge a result. Accuracy depends on source quality, overlap, configuration and your own validation.
Measurement and inspection
- Point-to-point distance, and point-to-plane perpendicular distance
- X, Y and Z component distances
- Distance projected onto the XY, XZ and YZ planes
- Three-point angle, with projections onto each plane
- Multi-point polygon area
- Multi-point convex-hull volume
- Detected plane area
- Local best-fit plane snapping for picked points, with configurable search radius
- Editable advanced measurement input points
- Finish, undo-last-point and restart controls while capturing area and volume
- Pin labels and geometry in the scene, and move labels for a readable layout
- Activate, deactivate, show and hide measurements independently
- Rename with project-unique friendly names
- Group measurements, move them between groups, remove them from groups, rename or dissolve groups
- Bulk activate, deactivate, show and hide by category
- Clear pinned labels
- Measurements and grouping state persist in the project
These are measurement and inspection tools. They are not certified metrology.
Planes and corners
- Detect planar surfaces from picked seed points, with automatic growth
- Transparent overlay so you can verify the detected surface visually
- Configurable point-to-plane tolerance
- Seed-local plane fitting, to follow gentle curvature
- Neighbourhood size, minimum-points and valid-seed thresholds
- Noise and RMS warnings, and seed-normal consistency filtering
- Parallel-layer splitting control
- Thin-slab restriction, to stop a selection jumping between nearby planes
- GPU cleanup passes for speckles and small islands
- Configurable neighbour search, growth, batching, surface-normal and point-limit controls
- Detect a corner or intersection line from two planar selections
- Separate selection workflow for each side of the corner, using point, brush, polygon or box tools
- Configurable corner-line extension, style, thickness and colour
Sections and profiles
- Axis-aligned sections by X, Y or Z
- Custom oriented plane sections
- Box sections and cylindrical sections
- Reposition and manipulate section geometry directly in the viewport
- Fit picked section points to a local best-fit plane
- Configurable extraction depth
- Generate section point results and polyline results
- Line-generation control including corridor width, opening thresholds, closure, minimum chain length and quality settings
- Show or hide plane fill and edges; configure active and inactive plane colours, opacity, size, edge style, edge thickness and highlight colour
- Show, hide or suppress sections independently, with suppression preserving generated results
- Detect whether results are current, stale, empty, busy or in error, and regenerate stale results
- Section definitions and generated state persist in the project
- Clear all sections
- Export one section to DXF, or batch export all eligible sections
- Export all sections as one merged DXF with a layer per section, or one DXF per section into a folder
- Include hidden and suppressed sections in a batch export when their results are current
Meshing
Reconstruction
- Generate a surface mesh from a selected point region, or from selected subsets when no region is active
- Source point count and measured spacing analysed before reconstruction
- Set an explicit physical target triangle edge length in millimetres
- Estimated triangle range and peak working-memory requirement shown before you start
- Automatic surface-intent selection, or explicit open or closed reconstruction
- Architecture-oriented local reconstruction for open surfaces
- Closed-surface reconstruction along a screened-Poisson path
- Structured and unstructured source analysis paths, with planar reconstruction where the evidence supports it
- Optional derived-copy healing for minor defects, preserving the validated base reconstruction
- Optional small-hole patching to a maximum hole diameter you set
- Validation and canonicalisation before a mesh is published to the project
- Source vertex colours retained on supported paths
Management and simplification
- Meshes stored as named project entities with source linkage and build metadata
- Rename, activate, deactivate, show, hide and delete meshes; inspect their properties
- Open mesh job logs and summaries
- Create a linked simplified copy without modifying the original
- Specify a target reduction percentage
- Enforce a maximum geometric deviation in millimetres
- Preserve boundaries, openings and sharp features while simplifying
- Export one or more meshes as binary glTF GLB or Wavefront OBJ, with companion material data where applicable
Export and deliverables
Point clouds
- Export active project content to LAS, LAZ, E57 or PLY
- LAS 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 output, with a compatible point-data format selection
- Available and missing attributes reviewed before export
- Source LAS scale, offset, VLR and format information preserved where full-fidelity export applies
- Automatic or manual coordinate scale and offset
- WKT coordinate-reference information preserved, omitted or supplied
- Safe handling of legacy LAS return-number limits, by block or explicit clamp
- E57 scan name and description metadata
- Selectable E57 fields such as normalised intensity, 16-bit RGB and derived return index and count
- Selectable PLY RGB and intensity fields
- Validation, warnings, estimated file size and a point-count summary before you write
CAD, mesh, image and document output
- DXF section points and linework, individual or merged, with layer organisation preserving section separation
- GLB for compact modern interchange, OBJ for broad DCC and CAD compatibility
- Viewport images as PNG, JPEG, BMP or TIFF at a chosen scale
- Export with the current background or a transparent one
- Include pinned dimensions and vector labels, with locked label scale for consistent annotation at higher resolutions
- Independent control of exported point size
- PDF viewport output – A4 or Letter, portrait or landscape, four margin presets, fit, fill or 1:1 scaling, white or best-effort transparent background
- Optional header, custom title, date and time, footer and page number, with the option to open the PDF when it is written
- Professional PDF measurement reports carrying names, kinds, values, grouping and project context, with report-time resolution and status information
Preferences
- Configurable project folder and merge-dialog behaviour
- Default point size, and selection marker size, style and colour
- Perspective strength and default render quality profile
- Background mode and colours
- Preview point budget, preview percentage and chunk-loading behaviour
- Inactive-subset visual treatment
- Section plane and edge styles
- Dimension, projection, corner and grid line styles
- Dimension colours by axis and projection plane, with line opacity and endpoint-disk styling
- Custom keyboard shortcuts with record, clear, reset, conflict and locked-action states
- Advanced visible-surface-selection tuning for expert workflows
- Reset-to-default controls for each major preference group
Account and licensing
- Authenticated account sign-in
- Seat-based entitlement with session validation
- Plan, seat, status and last-validation visible in preferences
- Session refresh and explicit sign-out
- Session persistence with security-oriented storage and validation
- Seat recovery when an assigned seat has to be reclaimed
- Connection and token-status diagnostics for support
- About, Help, application logs and diagnostic views