StereoCloud3D User Guide

StereoCloud3D is a Windows desktop application for stereoscopic restitution: it lets you view massive LiDAR / photogrammetric point clouds and digitize accurate 2D/3D CAD vector features directly on top of them, in true 3D stereo when you have the hardware for it.

Who this guide is for

This manual serves two audiences. Operators will find step-by-step workflows, keyboard shortcuts and reference tables. Decision makers / prospective customers can read the Overview and the feature chapters to understand what the product does and how it fits a survey, mapping or AEC pipeline.

2. Key concepts

3. System requirements

• Operating system: Windows 10 or Windows 11 (64-bit).
• GPU: an OpenGL-capable graphics card. A discrete GPU is strongly recommended for large clouds and stereo.
• Memory: 16 GB minimum; 32 GB or more for very large datasets.
• Disk: fast SSD; the converted tile index is stored alongside your project.
• Antivirus / Windows Defender: real-time scanning of thousands of tile files during cloud import can slow conversion dramatically. The installer offers to add recommended Defender exclusions (app folder + converter processes). For projects stored outside the install folder, also exclude your project root(s) in Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Manage settings → Exclusions, or run configure-defender-exclusions.ps1 from the install directory with -ProjectRoots. Third-party antivirus products need equivalent exclusions manually.
• Stereo hardware (optional): a 3D-capable display or projector for side-by-side output (e.g. PluraView / VoxelSpace / VIPTA StereoVisor side-by-side, or PluraView triple with one eye per panel).
• 3D navigation (strongly recommended): a trackball used together with a normal mouse. Primary (best fit): Kensington Expert Mouse or Expert Trackball (USB 047D) — large ball, scroll ring, four buttons. Also supported: Logitech ERGO M575 (current thumb trackball), and legacy Wireless Trackball M570 / Trackman Marble (USB 046D, often refurbished/used). Ball = digitizing Z quota; ring/wheel = Z speed; mouse MMB + ball = cloud rotation; MMB drag = pan. See Trackball navigation.
• Internet: required at activation and periodically for license validation.

4. Activation & licensing

At every launch StereoCloud3D shows the Activation window (StereoCloud3D — Activation). Enter the license key supplied with your subscription and click Activate.

• Activate — validate the key online and bind this computer to the license.
• Quit — close the application without activating.

You only type the key once. After the server accepts a key, the next launch opens with that key already in the field and the cursor in it: press Enter (or click Activate) and you are in. To use a different license, select the text and type over it.

While running, the app re-checks the license periodically. If the license expires or is revoked (beyond any grace period) the application will notify you and close. See Managing your license for the status dialog and how to move a license to another computer.

Update notification. After activation the app checks (in the background) whether a newer version has been published. When one is available, an Update available panel shows the new version number together with a concise list of the additions and changes, and a Download… button that opens the download page. Choose Later to dismiss it — the notice reappears at the next launch until you update.

5. Welcome screen

When no project is open you see the Welcome screen. From here you can:

• New Project… — create a fresh project (see below).
• Open Project… — pick an existing project.
• Open Folder… — open a project by selecting its folder.
• Recent projects — a wider list with name, path, short summary and a zenith thumbnail (Release 3.50). The preview is captured automatically the first time you open the project with a zenith view fully drawn; missing projects are shown in orange; entries without a preview show No preview.

Each recent entry offers Open, Protect… / Password… (manage a project password) and Delete… / Remove from list. Password-protected projects carry a locked badge. Deleting offers the choice to permanently remove the project from disk or merely drop it from the recent list.

You can return to this screen at any time with File → Home / Welcome (you will be prompted to save unsaved changes first).

6. Projects

6.1 Creating a project

Choose File → New Project… (Ctrl+N). In the dialog:

• Enter a Project name.
• Pick a Destination folder (use Browse…). The target folder must be empty.
• Optionally tick Protect with password and provide an operator name, password and confirmation.

Click Create. The project starts with an empty CAD drawing; you add clouds and CAD data afterwards via import (see Importing data).

6.2 Password protection

A project password is a soft access gate: when enabled, opening the project requires the password and an operator name (recorded in the job report). You can set, change or remove a password from three places:

• New Project → the Protect with password option.
• File → Project Security… — Enable / Update / Remove (removing requires the current password).
• Welcome → Protect… on a recent project.

6.3 Saving

• Save (Ctrl+S) writes the project manifest and drawing.
• Save As… (Ctrl+Shift+S) writes a copy.
• The title bar shows the project name with a * when there are unsaved changes.
• Each explicit Save or Save As also creates a versioned CAD backup of the current master drawing before it is overwritten (see 6.5).

6.4 Autosave & crash recovery

Autosave is on by default at a 5-minute interval (configurable 1–240 minutes in the Inspector panel). Autosave writes to a sidecar file (*.autosave.vec) — it does not overwrite your master drawing until you explicitly save. If the app finds a newer sidecar when opening a project it offers to Recover or Discard the unsaved changes. When closing with unsaved edits you are asked to Save, Don't save or Cancel.

Two recovery levels. The autosave sidecar protects against crashes and unexpected shutdowns. The rotating backups created on Save protect against mistakes after you have already committed a good drawing to disk (see below).

6.5 CAD drawing backups & restore

Release 3.20 adds a second backup level for the native CAD drawing:

• Level 1 — Autosave sidecar (cad/drawing.autosave.vec): written periodically while you work; offered automatically on reopen after a crash.
• Level 2 — Versioned backups on save: every time you choose Save or Save As, StereoCloud3D copies the current master cad/drawing.vec into cad/backups/ as drawing_YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.vec before overwriting the master. The ten most recent snapshots are kept; older ones are pruned automatically.

To reload an older drawing without hunting through folders, use File → Restore from backup… (Ctrl+Alt+R). The picker lists both autosave sidecars and timestamped backup versions (newest first), with file size and date. Choosing a backup reloads that .vec into the session and marks the project dirty until you save again — your current master file on disk is not touched until you explicitly save over it.

7. Importing data

7.1 Importing point clouds (LAS / LAZ / E57)

Open the Project Manager (Ctrl+P) and choose Import cloud…. Select one or more .las / .laz / .e57 files (multi-select is supported).

E57 (terrestrial scanners). .e57 is the format Leica, FARO, NavVis and Trimble export. One file can hold several scan stations, and each station stores its points in the scanner’s own frame together with the pose that places it in the survey: StereoCloud3D applies that pose, so stations arrive where the registration put them instead of piled on one another. Colour and intensity are read when the export carries them, invalid points are discarded, and the coordinate system is taken from the file’s coordinateMetadata when it declares one — many exports leave it empty, and the import then reports “no coordinate system declared” rather than guessing.

New imports are converted with the bundled octree_builder into a streaming octree under cloud/<layer>/octree/ (metadata + hierarchy + blobs). When you select several tiles of the same flight/block, StereoCloud3D asks whether to merge them into one cloud (one octree; overlapping tiles are decimated together) or keep one layer per file.

While conversion runs, a progress dialog (Importing clouds) reports:

• Dataset — number of files and total size on disk (MB).
• Overall progress across all files (i / N files).
• Current file name, its point count (or “reading header…”), and the current phase.
• A per-file progress bar.

Minimum point spacing

Two points closer together than the minimum point spacing are surplus from overlapping passes: the octree stops subdividing at that cell size and keeps one point per cell. The control sits in the Project Manager, above Import cloud…, and it is set before the import rather than discovered afterwards in the report.

• Measured on the data (recommended) — the converter measures the delivery's own native spacing (the median distance from a point to its nearest neighbour, in 3D) and uses it, never going above the ceiling of the current workspace: 2 cm for Mobile Mapping and Terrestrial Mapping, 5 cm for Aerial Mapping, 5 cm for a project with no workspace. The measured value is written into the import log.
• Set by me — the value you type is used exactly as given, with no ceiling.
• None — every point is kept.

Import report

When conversion succeeds an Import report summarizes the result:

• Layers imported, Total points, Total source size (MB).
• Extent (local) — width × depth and height of the combined bounds.
• Attributes present — XYZ always, plus RGB and/or Intensity when available.
• A per-layer table: layer name, type (LAS/LAZ), points and size.

If conversion fails, a Cloud import failed dialog shows the error message together with the tail of the converter's output to help diagnose the problem.

Project Manager — Properties tab

Release 3.20 adds a Properties tab to the Project Manager (Ctrl+P). It summarizes the open project without opening folders in Explorer:

• Storage — project path, total size on disk, created/modified timestamps from the manifest.
• Point clouds — layer count (visible/total), indexed point count, tile count, LAS source count and points, cloud data size on disk.
• Imagery — layer count (visible/total) and imagery folder size.
• CAD — drawing file name, file size, entity count (when CAD is loaded), CAD folder size, number of versioned backups and autosave sidecar presence.

Statistics are cached for a few seconds so the panel stays responsive on large projects.

7.2 Adding an existing tile index

If you already have a converted tile_index.json, use Project → Add cloud tile index… to attach it without re-converting.

7.3 Importing CAD (DWG / DXF / VEC)

Use Project → Import CAD (DWG/DXF/VEC)… or CAD → Import DWG / DXF / VEC…. Imported geometry is converted into the project's native drawing. To send work back out, use CAD → Export drawing (DXF)….

• DWG — AutoCAD 2000 (AC1015) or older, via the bundled IOSfiDwg package (CadConvert.exe + SoftFly x86 runtime). Newer DWG files must be saved as AutoCAD 2000 or normalized with ODA File Converter if installed.
• DXF — modern ASCII R2013/R2018 via dxf_to_vec / cartographic path; legacy DXF can fall back to the same IOSfiDwg converter.
• VEC — native VeCAD format, copied in directly.

The installer ships IOSfiDwg\ as a subdirectory next to the application so its x86 CadDLL.dll never overwrites the app x64 CAD engine DLL.

When an import, export or xref is refused

A drawing that cannot be read used to close the progress overlay exactly as a successful one did, leaving you to work out from the empty drawing that something had gone wrong. Now a dialog says what happened, and it distinguishes three cases:

• Refused — the file could not be converted. The dialog names the file and the reason the converter gave. The most common one is the DWG version: anything newer than AutoCAD 2000 (AC1015) has to be saved down or normalized first.
• Imported, but empty — the conversion worked and produced no geometry. Usually a drawing whose content sits in an unsupported entity type, or in external references that were not supplied.
• CAD imported, with exclusions — the geometry is there, but some entity types were dropped. The dialog lists which, so you know what to look for before you start drawing on top of something that is missing.

7.4 Importing imagery / orthophotos

Release 3.18 adds a georeferenced imagery workflow; 3.71 adds ECW import (via a one-time QGIS LTR install), lists every layer in the Scene Tree, and shows visible imagery in the Zenith Overview as soon as tiles are ready.

Ways to add an image:

• File → Import imagery… (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+U), or type IMAGERY / ECW on the command line.
• Project Manager (Ctrl+P) → Imagery tab → Import imagery….
• Scene Tree — right-click Imagery (or a layer) → Add imagery… (opens Project Manager on the Imagery tab).

The importer converts the source to tiled GeoTIFF assets stored inside the project under imagery/layer_N/, plus an imagery_index.json for streaming.

• Georeferenced placement — imagery is read from its world coordinates and presented in the WCS / Zenith Overview below CAD vectors, so orthophotos and imported drawings can be checked together.
• Project-managed layers — each imagery import creates a project layer with a matching CAD layer entry. Showing/hiding the imagery layer (Scene Tree tick, Imagery toolbar, or Ctrl+Shift+I) keeps the CAD layer visibility synchronized.
• Runtime packaging — the installer includes the GDAL executables, runtime DLLs, GDAL data and PROJ data required by the imagery pipeline. ECW additionally needs QGIS LTR on the PC (see below).
• Diagnostics — if conversion fails, StereoCloud3D shows a detailed failure report with the converter output tail, so missing georeference or unsupported raster formats can be identified quickly.

Supported source formats

GeoTIFF/TIFF, ECW, JPEG, PNG and BMP. GeoTIFF and ECW carry their own georeferencing; JPEG, PNG and BMP need a world sidecar (.jgw, .pgw, .bpw, .wld) or an .aux.xml in the same folder. Whatever the source, the import stores a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF inside the project, so the original format matters only at import time.

Coordinate system of the imagery

Imagery is never reprojected. The raster is drawn where its own coordinates say, so it lines up with the cloud only when both are in the same coordinate system. A raster in a different system still imports and still looks correct on its own — it simply lands beside the cloud, by the distance between the two systems.

StereoCloud3D compares the coordinate system declared by the raster with the one recorded for the project, and writes both into the log together with size, geotransform and extent. This runs twice: at the end of an import, tagged [imagery-import] and covering only the layers that import just added, and at every project open, tagged [imagery-open] and covering every imagery layer the project has — so a project imported before this check existed still puts its coordinate systems in a support log.

At import only, two outcomes also raise a dialog, because in both the photo may really be somewhere else:

• Different systems — the raster declares a coordinate system that is not the project's.
• No system at all — the raster carries only a geotransform (typically a world sidecar with no .prj), so its coordinates are taken as already being the project's.

The dialog names both systems and does not block anything: the import has finished and the layer is usable. Check the overlay against the cloud; if it is offset, re-export the raster in the project's coordinate system and import it again. When the two systems match, or when neither side declares enough to compare, nothing is shown and the verdict stays in the log.

Opening a project never raises the dialog, only the log lines. The question belongs to the moment the file is chosen and can be re-exported; asked again at every open it would become a warning the operator learns to close without reading.

7.5 Importing ground photographs

Project → Import photographs… copies photographs of the structure — the ones taken by hand from the ground, one per face — into the project and files them under Photos in the Scene Tree.

These are not imagery. An imagery layer is a georeferenced orthophoto draped on the world XY plane (§7.4); a ground photograph is a perspective picture of an elevation, taken from an unknown position. The two go through different paths on purpose.

• Where the files go — copied into <project>/photos, keeping your own file name, so the Scene Tree shows what the project actually contains and Delete can remove both the record and the file. The source folder is left untouched.
• Same name, different picture — a second photograph that happens to share a name is imported as name (2).jpg rather than overwriting the first. Importing the same file again lands on the same node instead of adding a second one.
• What is read — camera make and model, focal length, focal length as a 35 mm equivalent, date taken, picture size and orientation, exactly as the camera wrote them. Right-click the photograph → Details → Camera to see them. A picture that carries no EXIF — one that came through a chat application, or was re-saved by an editor — imports normally with those fields empty.
• Look at one — right-click → View image… opens it in the image viewer.

7.6 Orienting a photograph against a drawing

An imported photograph is stored and described, not positioned. Orienting it works out where the camera stood, by matching a handful of features between the picture and a drawing of the same face. Right-click the photograph in the Scene Tree → Orient against a drawing….

Two pictures appear side by side. Every pixel of the drawing already knows its position in space, so a click there is a 3D point — nothing has to be found in the 3D viewport.

• Choose the drawing at the top. Only drawings that have been generated can be paired: pairing needs their depth, and depth is produced by generating, not stored in the delivered image. Ungenerated drawings are listed but greyed out. Choosing one prepares it, which takes a few seconds.
• Click in pairs — the same detail on the photograph and on the drawing, in either order. The panel says which half it is waiting for. A pair completes on its own second click and the next one starts immediately; there is no button between them.
• Wheel zooms towards the cursor, middle-drag pans, double middle-click brings the whole picture back into view.
• Remove a point with the x on its row, or select the row and press Delete.
• Drawing brightness lifts a dark elevation so its features can be seen well enough to click. It affects the display only and never the geometry.

From the fourth point on, the position is worked out again after every change and the result appears above the list: the typical error and the worst point, each in pixels and in centimetres on the structure, plus how far away the camera was. Every matched point is numbered on both pictures and coloured by its own error — green under 2 px, amber to 6, red beyond — so a wrong pair can be seen rather than merely suspected.

The matched points and the resulting position are saved as soon as they change, in <project>/photos, and come back when the photograph is opened again. An oriented photograph also appears under Products → Oriented photographs with its drawing, its error in centimetres and its point count, because that error is what decides whether the position can be used.

8. The workspace

The main window is organised around a central 3D viewport with a menu bar on top, optional toolbars, and movable floating panels.

8.0 Desktop chrome (3.25)

With a project open, the mono content band uses a fixed left-to-right chrome layout:

1. CAD Tools — docked Draw / Modify strip (left).
2. Scene Tree — project hierarchy (clouds, AOIs, imagery, DTM).
3. Zenith Overview — optional plan map (when enabled).
4. Mono viewport — cloud + CAD (centre).
5. Object Snap — docked snap toggles (right).

Drag the vertical splitters between docks to resize; widths are remembered separately for each workspace (see 8.6, Your arrangement is remembered per workspace) once you have dragged one there, and fall back to your last width elsewhere until you do. Busy overlays dim only the mono viewport so Tools / Scene Tree / Overview / OSnap stay usable.

8.0.1 Where the job stands

At the head of the Scene dock, above the Project and Graph tabs, a strip names the workspace in its colour and lists the steps that kind of job goes through — for an aerial project: Data, Classification, Extraction, Drawing, Delivery.

Each step carries a mark read from the project itself:

• [x] — the project already contains what that step produces.
• [ ] — nothing that step produces is in the project yet.
• [?] — the project records nothing about that step, so its state cannot be read. Reviewing a station run and dimensioning a drawing are not written into the project, so those two steps always read this way. A mark that guessed would be worse than one that says so.

Nothing is stored to keep these marks: they are derived from the project every time it is drawn, so they cannot drift away from it, and a project made before this existed reads correctly without conversion. The steps orient the work — they never block it, and any of them can be done in any order.

Clicking a step selects, in the tree below, what that step produced. It moves the selection and nothing else: no panel opens, no view changes, no command starts.

8.0.2 Scene Tree

View → Scene Tree (shortcut in Keyboard Shortcuts) docks the scene graph beside the Tools strip. Nodes cover Project, CAD, Clouds, AOIs, Imagery, Photos and everything the job produced. Use the visibility checkbox to show/hide that segment. Only rows whose tick box actually switches something have one — clouds, imagery, ortho sheets, the surface models (DTM, DSM, nDSM) and any node that owns CAD entities; product family folders carry no tick box, because hiding a folder does not hide what is under it. Three rows are master switches for a whole kind of content rather than for a subtree: Clouds, CAD and Imagery. Switching Clouds off hides the point cloud and nothing else — a drawing filed under a cloud's processings stays on screen.

A product's name has to identify it, not classify it: surface products carry their mean elevation, and buildings carry their number, because six pitches of the same kind used to give six identical rows that said what they were and never which.

A folder opens on at most 50 rows. Past that it stops and offers Show the other N, which reveals the rest of that folder for the session. A job that numbers four hundred buildings would otherwise put four hundred leaves between you and the next branch. The choice is a way of looking, so it is not saved with the project.

The CAD row opens on the drawing's layers — those that hold at least one entity, with the count beside each name. Each tick box switches that layer on or off through the same native call the Layer Manager makes, so the two always agree. This is the axis that crosses all the buildings at once: switching FALDA off hides every roof pitch in the drawing, however and whenever it was drawn. The tick boxes on the Buildings products do something narrower — each one hides the entities that one reconstruction run created, and nothing drawn by hand belongs to any product at all. The surface models are an exclusive group: there is a single raster under the Zenith Overview, so ticking one unticks the others, the folder row says one at a time, and hovering the tick box says the same. The identical switch is in Display → Overview as radio buttons; both go through the same service, so the two can never disagree. When you open a project, the tree expands fully so every folder is visible.

Context menus (right-click):

• Cloud — color mode and cloud-related actions.
• Imagery (folder or layer) — Add imagery… opens Project Manager on the Imagery tab (GeoTIFF, ECW, JPEG, PNG). On a layer, View image… opens the GeoTIFF in the image viewer.
• AOI — define/redraw the rectangle that bounds where the algorithms compute, and Algorithms (Cleanup, Voxel, SOR) enabled according to the estimated point count (with downsample when over the process limit). The AOI does not limit what is displayed: the cloud is always drawn whole.

Selecting a defined AOI shows a short capability summary (estimated points, and which algorithms can run on them) at the bottom of the panel.

Products (elaborati)

Everything a job produces is filed under Products, grouped by family: surface models, buildings, spot heights, ortho sheets and their plans, elevations and sections, CAD sheets, exports and reports. A product carries the run that made it, its parameters, its status and the files it wrote, and its right-click menu offers Show in the Zenith Overview, Open in image viewer, Show files in Explorer and Remove from tree. A sheet that has already been exported or placed on a CAD sheet is marked delivered / on a sheet with the date.

8.0.3 Project Graph

Project Graph — read-only view of project data, processing and product dependencies. The Scene dock carries two tabs, Project and Graph: the first is the tree described above, the second draws the same model as a diagram. It is a view, not an editor. Nothing is created, renamed, deleted or connected from it, and no layout is stored: the picture is rebuilt from the project every time it is drawn, so it cannot disagree with the data it describes.

It describes the project and does not command it: there is no Show or Hide here. Selecting a node is not the same act as putting it on screen, and what goes on screen is chosen in the Display panel (8.0.4), which is the one place that governs representation.

Nodes are laid out in three fixed columns, left to right, so a dependency reads in the direction it flows:

• Data — what was loaded or imported: point clouds, orthophotos, the project CAD drawing.
• Process — a run that was executed, such as a classification.
• Product — what a run produced: surface models, buildings, spot heights, exports and the rest.

Each card carries two lines, with a coloured edge marking the category. The first names the node — for a run, the operation it performed. The second names the run it belongs to, as a compact local date and time: two executions of the same operation are otherwise indistinguishable, and a product shows the run that last wrote it rather than the day the node was created. A node that belongs to no run — a cloud, the drawing — shows its type instead. A name too long for the card is shortened; the full name, the type and the stored UTC stamp appear in the tooltip, and the properties strip at the bottom of the panel carries the detail. Data that has not been used by any run simply has no line attached — an orthophoto that no process reads stays on its own, which is the honest picture.

Relations. Input runs from a datum to the process that reads it, Output from a process to what it produced, and Mutates back from a process to a datum it rewrote in place — a classification is the one operation that does this, since the ASPRS class byte is written inside the cloud itself. DerivedFrom is a summary of the same provenance and is hidden by default to keep the diagram readable; when it is hidden the panel states how many relations are not being drawn, and the Show DerivedFrom tick box brings them back.

Moving around. The mouse wheel zooms, dragging the background pans, and Fit graph brings everything back into view. Nodes themselves are not draggable: their position is decided by the layout, not by the operator. Clicking a node selects it, and the selection is shared with the Project tab — pick a node in one, switch tab, and it is still selected in the other.

Selecting a node shows what the project actually records about it: for a point cloud, which attributes it carries (RGB, intensity, classification); for a run, its operation, when it happened and the parameters it used; for a product, its family, its status and the files it wrote. A product also states Created and, when they are not the same thing, Produced by: the first is when the node came into being, the second is the run that last rewrote its files — a raster made in the morning and recomputed in the afternoon reports both. Times are shown in your own time zone; what the project stores stays UTC and is unchanged. When a node has nothing recorded yet, the panel says so rather than inventing a value.

8.0.4 Display panel

Display — one panel that answers, for the view you are looking at, what is on screen and what could be there instead. Open it from View → Display. It carries two tabs, 3D Scene and Overview, because the two views do not show the same things: the point cloud never appears in the overview, and the surface rasters never appear in the 3D view.

It replaces the horizontal Display toolbar. Everything that toolbar carried about representation moved here; the controls that were not about representation went back to where they belong — AUTO-Z and GND-Z are in Draw → Snap, the plan-view button is View → Top (WCS), and stereo together with the display layout is in the Stereo menu, which lists every layout rather than cycling through some of them.

Three shapes of control, and each one means exactly one thing throughout the panel:

• a tick box is an object that can be on screen alongside the others — the cloud, the CAD drawing, the imagery;
• a radio button is a representation that excludes the others — the cloud is coloured one way at a time, and the overview carries one surface raster at a time;
• a slider is an option of whatever is currently chosen, and appears only when that choice makes it meaningful.

It is the only place these choices are made. The Cloud Visualization panel it replaced is gone; its colour mode, class list, point size, tint and flat colour are all here, and Cache tiles — a streaming setting, not a way of representing anything — moved to the Inspector beside the scene origin. Ctrl+Shift+L still opens this panel.

3D Scene. The theme decides how the cloud is coloured: RGB, intensity, elevation, classification, or classification tinted over the photo, plus a flat colour and a per-source tint. A theme whose attribute the cloud does not carry is disabled and says so on hover. The theme is shared by mono and stereo — there is one cloud and one colouring, and the panel states it rather than letting you discover it. Below, the options follow the theme: point size always, the ramp under elevation, tint strength under classification tint, and the class list under either classification theme, where each ASPRS class can be switched off individually. Only classes actually seen in the tiles loaded so far are listed.

Brightness and shadows. A survey taken in a courtyard, under a vault or on a north facade arrives dark, and no colour theme fixes that on its own. Two sliders sit under the theme, offered whatever the theme is: Brightness multiplies the colour and clips at white, so it is the one to reach for first; Shadows lifts the dark end without touching the highlights, which is what recovers detail in a shaded corner that brightness alone would only wash out. Both are 1.00 by default, meaning the colour exactly as the data delivers it, and a small Reset tone button appears as soon as either leaves that value. They are applied by the shader, so they are live while dragged on a cloud of any size — nothing is recomputed and nothing is re-uploaded — and they are stored with the project.

Elevation ramps. The elevation theme paints between the lowest and highest point on screen, and four ramps are offered, each drawn as a swatch beside its name because a ramp is chosen by eye. Spectrum is the original blue-green-red and stays the default, so an existing project opens looking exactly as it did. It is also the one to move away from where the picture matters: its brightness rises and then falls, so the eye reads a hard edge at the yellow band where the ground has none. Grayscale, Terrain and Cool all climb in brightness from bottom to top, which is what makes a slope read as a slope; Terrain shades it like a relief map, and Cool stays quiet enough to leave CAD linework legible over the cloud. The choice is saved in the project. A project written before this existed keeps its old grayscale setting, which becomes the Grayscale ramp.

Overview. These controls and the project tree are the two ways to set what the Zenith Overview shows; its own header names the raster on screen but no longer sets it. Imagery is a base that can be shown or hidden as a whole; the opacity of each imagery layer stays on that layer in the project tree. Beneath it, exactly one surface raster may be shown — None, or one of the DTM, DSM and nDSM this project has produced — with an opacity slider that appears once one is chosen. The same choice is on the tree's surface-model rows as an exclusive tick box; the opacity stays here. When the DTM is also the terrain the rest of the application samples for ground heights, the row says so: that is a role it carries, not a way of looking at it.

8.0.5 UI language (3.25.2)

The UI supports English, Italian, French, German and Spanish for menus, the Scene Tree, Welcome, Project Manager, Display setup, shortcuts, toolbars, and many panel/dialog titles. Open Help → Language (available with or without a project open):

• Auto (system) — follows the Windows UI language when it matches a supported code; otherwise English.
• Or pick a language explicitly; chrome updates immediately.

CAD Draw / Modify command names stay in English (CadDll). Some long dialog body text may still appear in English until later fill-in. The choice is saved in application settings.

8.1 Menus

8.2 Panels and dialogs

Most auxiliary windows are independent ImGui panels: they open as floating windows that you can drag by the title bar and resize freely (see 8.4 Arranging the workspace). At a clean startup only the Welcome screen is shown; Browser, Inspector, Command Line and the built-in toolbars start closed until you open them from the menus or shortcuts.

Dialogs are summoned, not restored. Project Manager, Layer Order, Toolbars, Entity Groups, Keyboard Shortcuts and Macro Commands answer a question you asked once, so they always start closed — leaving one open when you quit does not bring it back at the next start. Working chrome does come back exactly as you left it: toolbars, Scene Tree, Zenith Overview, Command Line, Layer Manager and Entity Properties.

The amber navigation reminder above the status bar names the three mouse gestures for new operators. Closing it — either control on the band — hides it until the next installation; Help → Show navigation reminder brings it back sooner.

• Browser — project tree, navigation settings (including Kensington trackball), and quick links to Project Manager.
• Inspector — project & scene settings (navigation, magnifier, autosave, save drawing). Point-cloud color mode and classification filters live in Cloud Visualization.
• Command Line — type commands and read system feedback (see Command line).

Additional panels open from menus or shortcuts and remember their last position:

The status bar (stereo coordinatograph and cursor readout at the bottom of the main window) is not a floating panel; it is drawn as a fixed overlay on top of the viewport.

Some operations still use native Windows file dialogs (New / Open / Save / Import / Export). The license gate at first launch and a few confirmation prompts are modal dialogs.

8.3 Toolbars

Every bar is chosen in one window: View → Toolbars… (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T). It used to be a submenu of tick boxes, which meant opening it to find out what was already on; the window shows all of them at once. They are all off by default until you enable them:

• CAD Draw — points, lines, polylines, text, and related draw commands.
• CAD Circle — circle variants (centre/radius, 2-point, 3-point, tangent…).
• CAD Arc — arc construction tools.
• CAD Dimension — linear, aligned, angular and other dimension commands.
• CAD Modify — move, copy, rotate, scale, trim, extend, and related edits.
• CAD Flow — workflow helpers (OK / Esc / Undo / Redo / Quote).
• Object Snap — running snaps, Cloud Z, AUTO-Z, GND-Z, WIRE-Z and the POLAR toggle.
• Imagery — orthophoto on/off and opacity (when imagery is present).
• Cloud plane UCS — RANSAC plane UCS helper bar.
• Custom toolbar — your own floating bar of favourite actions.

The same window's Property bars section carries the combo strips. By default the Layer combo strip can be enabled there: a compact current-layer picker alongside the floating bars. Optional combos (colour, linetype, lineweight, dimension style) can be turned on when you need them; full layer editing remains in Layer Manager (LA).

Upgrading from an older release that had a single CAD Tools bar: the first launch after update may enable all six CAD bars if you previously used the old combined toolbar.

Customize custom toolbar…, at the foot of the same window, is an editor where you add buttons from a catalog of app actions, panels and typed CAD commands. Each button has a label, a command string and an optional tooltip. Your custom toolbar is saved between sessions.

8.4 Arranging the workspace

Before you start digitizing, it is worth spending a few minutes exploring what the application offers and arranging the workspace to suit your workflow:

1. Skim the View, CAD, Draw (object snap is a submenu of it), Modify, Cloud and Stereo menus to see available commands.
2. Open CAD → Keyboard Shortcuts… (Ctrl+K) to review managed shortcuts and rebind anything you use often.
3. Open View → Toolbars… to enable CAD Draw / Circle / Arc / Dimension / Modify / Flow, Object Snap, Imagery, and the Layer combo strip in its Property bars section (plus any optional property combos you need). The Display panel is its own row in View.
4. Turn on the panels you want (Browser, Inspector, Command Line, Layer Manager, etc.) from View or their menu shortcuts, then drag each floating window to a comfortable position and size.
5. Optionally build a Custom toolbar (View → Toolbars…) with your favourite actions.

Panels and toolbars are floating only (there is no docking or tabbed dock regions): drag them by the title bar, resize from the edges, and close them with the × button. While the pointer is over a panel, toolbar, menu or dialog, the normal Windows cursor is shown and mouse clicks go to the UI — not to CAD pick/zoom/pan. Over the viewport (with no UI under the cursor), the CAD crosshair and navigation apply.

The application remembers your arrangement automatically when you exit. You can also save or reload it explicitly (see 8.5).

8.5 Saving and restoring layout

Workspace layout is stored in two places:

• settings.json — which panels and toolbars were open (uiPanels).
• imgui.ini — floating window positions and sizes.

On every normal exit the current layout is written to both files. To capture a layout mid-session without closing the application, use:

• View → Save workspace layout (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+W)

To reload the last saved layout from disk (for example after experimenting with window positions), use:

• View → Restore workspace layout (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+L)

Restore reapplies panel/toolbar visibility from settings.json and reloads window geometry from imgui.ini. Keyboard shortcut overrides and toolbar customizations also live in settings.json but are not changed by Restore unless you saved them together with the layout.

8.6 Project workspaces

A workspace says which kind of job a project is. There are three, and they are three different acquisition pipelines — different data, different tools, different questions:

What they share is the engine — point cloud, CAD, stereo, measurement, object snap, cursor elevation, cloud cleanup — which is always available whichever workspace a project uses. On top of that engine the three are genuinely different applications, not three variants of one.

One entry per pipeline

There are three pipelines, so both places that offer them — the New Project dialog and View → Workspace — list exactly three entries: Aerial Mapping, Terrestrial Mapping, Mobile Mapping. Neither opens a submenu of starting points.

Terrestrial Mapping used to ask a second question here, offering Bridges, Buildings and Monuments. It no longer does. Those three were one job seen three ways — the same oriented box with plans, elevations and sections cut through it — and differed only in which toolbars opened first, which is not a question about the survey. Projects created on any of them keep working exactly as before.

Do not confuse the workspace with a drawing template. The Drawing template field lower in the New Project dialog is a different thing: it seeds the CAD drawing with squaring and title block layers.

What a workspace changes

Which panels and toolbars are open: Scene Tree, Zenith Overview, the Workbox (Terrestrial Mapping only), the CAD draw / modify / circle / arc / dimension / flow toolbars, Object Snap, Display, Imagery, Cloud plane UCS, Layer Manager and Entity Properties. It does not change the project format, the data, the point cloud or the CAD drawing.

Your arrangement is yours

How you arrange the interface is yours, and there is one arrangement: the panels and toolbars you left open are the ones you find. Opening a project never rearranges anything — not from the workspace preset, and not from any remembered snapshot. A preset is applied only on a deliberate act: creating a project, or picking a workspace from the View menu. To put the panels back the way the workspace defines them, use View → Workspace → Apply workspace layout.

The width of the fixed CAD Tools / Scene Tree / Object Snap bands is the one thing remembered per kind of job: drag one wider on a Terrestrial Mapping job (whose scene tree runs session → families → elaborati, deeper than an aerial one) and it stays wide there without following you to the next aerial project. A band never dragged on a given workspace keeps whatever width you last set anywhere, rather than snapping to a default. Widths only — which panels are open is never decided for you.

What is never touched. Floating window positions and sizes, docking, which monitor a window is on, your stereo and display layout, your custom toolbar, and any panel you open on demand (Project Manager, Keyboard Shortcuts, Macro Commands, Browser, Inspector, command line). Those stay in settings.json and imgui.ini — the fixed CAD Tools / Scene Tree / Object Snap bands above are not floating windows, which is why their width is the one exception.

Where it is stored

The workspace and the profile are properties of the project and travel with it: both ids are written to scene_graph.json. How you personally arranged the interface stays in your own settings, so two operators can open the same project on differently arranged desks.

Projects made before this

A project created before workspaces existed has no workspace set. Nothing is applied to it and nothing about it changes; View → Workspace shows (not set) until you choose one, and the status bar names the product rather than a kind of job.

Projects created when Architecture, Infrastructure and Bridges were separate workspaces still open exactly as they did. Architecture and Bridges now open as Terrestrial Mapping, on the profile that keeps the panels they had. Infrastructure opens with no workspace set: a road survey is an aerial job or a mobile one depending on how it was flown or driven, and the file cannot say which — so the software attributes nothing and leaves the choice to you.

Projects created while this pipeline was called Built Artefacts (versions 3.86 to 3.90) open unchanged as Terrestrial Mapping, on the same starting point they were created with. Only the name changed; nothing is rewritten in the project file.

The three window buttons

Three windows are opened and closed the same way, from three buttons stacked in the top-left corner of the mono view: Scene Tree, Multiview and Zenith Overview. Each one is blue and reads Open… while its window is closed, and amber-orange and reads Close… while it is open. The same click that opened it closes it, so no window can be left on screen with no visible way back.

Multiview and the Zenith Overview are one slot, not two. Both dock into the band beside the mono view, and that band holds one panel at a time — together with the mobile station strip and the sheet index, which have always shared it. Opening one closes the other. Their two buttons are adjacent in the column for that reason: they are an alternative, not two independent switches. The Scene Tree has its own dock on the left and is unaffected.

A button appears only where its window belongs to the kind of job. Mobile Mapping shows only Multiview: that pipeline is its three synchronized views plus the station strip, and neither the Scene Tree nor the Overview has anything to add to a run read that way. Multiview is offered because a roof or a road is drawn on a vehicle survey too — but it starts closed, since the band it would take is the station strip's, and opening it puts the strip away. Every window stays reachable from View and from its keyboard shortcut whatever the workspace, so nothing is ever locked away — the button says what this job normally uses, not what it is allowed to use.

Changed. Aerial Mapping now starts with the Scene Tree open and the Zenith Overview closed; before, it was the other way round. A window that costs one click to open and one to close does not have to be guessed right by a preset. Your own arrangement is still remembered per workspace (8.5), so once you have set a job up your way, that is what comes back.

Licensing

Every pipeline is active for a year from purchase, and every pipeline is active for the whole trial. A licence that has never named a specific pipeline — which is every licence issued so far — still opens all three: nothing changes for you until renewal per pipeline actually starts.

Once a licence names which pipelines it renews, one you did not renew behaves exactly like (not set) above: the project opens, your data is untouched, only the specialisation goes inert. The status bar names which pipeline lapsed, in amber, next to the base product name. New Project and View → Workspace still list a pipeline you do not currently have, disabled, so you always see it exists.

9. Navigating & snapping

9.1 View navigation

• Top (T) — orthographic top view.
• Fit Extents (F) — frame the whole scene.
• Unlock input (Ctrl+Shift+R) — clears stuck pan/orbit sessions, closes escapable modals and reclaims keyboard focus without changing the current view (see 9.7).
• Restore view and alignment — recovers input, then restores zenith WCS and re-syncs cloud, CAD and camera (see 9.7).
• Right mouse button (RMB) drag — rotates the model. Hold the right button and drag to orbit the view around the cloud point at the centre of the window, resampled as you drag. This is the primary rotation gesture, the one most 3D software uses. A right click without dragging still opens the framing/context menu (see framing commands).
• Middle mouse button (MMB) drag — pan the view when idle (cloud and CAD move together). Shift+MMB drag also rotates, kept as a fallback. While a draw tool is active, MMB drag orbits instead (see 9.2).
• Mouse wheel — live zoom toward the cursor. The wheel speed is adjustable in the Inspector (default 2.0). The cloud uses a temporary lower resolution while the wheel is moving; full detail returns shortly after you stop.
• Show cloud (Ctrl+Shift+C), Show CAD (Ctrl+Shift+D) and Show imagery (Ctrl+Shift+I) switch a whole kind of content on and off. Their tick boxes are the Clouds, CAD and Imagery rows of the project tree — the rows that name the content — and the shortcuts do the same thing. Cloud on mono view (Ctrl+Alt+C) hides the cloud on the mono UI only while stereo keeps it; it is a property of one view, so it lives in Display → View.

Framing commands (right-click menu)

Right-click on empty space in the viewport opens the CAD context menu. Besides Zoom Extents it offers the framing commands below. All of them act on the georeferenced mono view; when that view is not the active one the command says so in the log instead of doing nothing.

• Zoom Window — pick two opposite corners in the viewport and the view frames that rectangle. Drag from one corner to the other, or click once on each corner; both work. The rectangle is widened to the shape of the viewport, never cropped, so everything you enclosed stays visible. A rectangle smaller than a few pixels is refused rather than throwing you into an unreadable scale. Esc or a right-click cancels while the corners are being picked, and so does starting any other command.
• Zoom Previous — returns to the framing you had before the last zoom or pan. The application records one entry per zoom-extents, per zoom-window, per wheel burst and per pan drag, so repeated calls walk back through the framings you actually recognise instead of one wheel notch at a time. Orbit is deliberately not recorded: this command restores the framing, not the orientation.
• Zoom In / Zoom Out — halve or double the framed area around the centre of the view. Same effect as the wheel, in one fixed step, for when you want a repeatable amount rather than a gesture.
• Zoom Selection — frames the selected entity, with a margin so it does not sit against the edges. The entity's own vertices are projected through the same projection that draws the scene, so it works in zenith and in oblique alike, and it reaches a selection that is currently off screen. The menu entry is greyed out when nothing is selected. With several entities selected it frames the one the CAD engine reports as current, not their combined extents.
• Pan — while it is on, dragging with the left button moves the view, exactly as a middle-drag does. It stays on until Esc, a right-click, or any other command ends it; the status bar shows Pan for as long as it is armed. The middle button keeps working throughout, so this command is a convenience, not the only way to pan.

Each one also answers to its typed command — ZW/ZOOMW, ZP/ZOOMP, ZI/ZOOMI, ZO/ZOOMO, ZS/ZOOMSEL, P/PAN — and can be given a key of your own in Keyboard Shortcuts.

Navigation reminder band

The first time a project is opened, a yellow band appears directly above the status bar listing the mouse gestures: wheel to zoom, middle button held to pan, and the right button held to rotate the model. It is there because the rotation gesture is the one nobody guesses.

The band takes its own strip and never covers the 3D view. Both controls do the same thing — the x and the Do not show again box hide it until the next installation, and installing a newer version shows it once more, because that is when the gestures are worth naming again. Help → Show navigation reminder brings it back at any time.

9.2 Orbit on three axes (cloud pivot)

StereoCloud3D lets you rotate the view around any point on the cloud — essential for inspecting façades, bridge soffits, dam faces and other oblique work before you lock in a Stereo UCS wall view. Orbit uses a pivot on the cloud surface and supports yaw, pitch and roll (three independent axes).

The pivot takes itself

• Point at the place you want to turn around and start dragging with the right button. The pivot is sampled on the cloud under the cursor at the instant the drag begins, and the view turns about that point until you release.
• Every drag takes its own pivot, so you change the centre of rotation simply by starting the next drag somewhere else. There is nothing to set beforehand and nothing to clear afterwards.
• If there is no cloud under the cursor the pivot falls back to the view centre, as it always did — the rotation still works, it just turns around the middle of the screen.
• With vertical exaggeration on, the pivot lands on the point you pointed at, and the view turns about it in both the cloud and the CAD.

Rotate around the pivot

• Shift + MMB drag — yaw (horizontal) and pitch (vertical) around the pivot. Cloud and CAD rotate together.
• Ctrl + Shift + MMB drag — roll (twist) around the view axis through the pivot.
• Alt + right-button drag — turns the model around the vertical axis (world Z) through the pivot, like a turntable: the tilt you have chosen stays exactly as it is and only the direction you are looking from changes. The plain right-button drag turns around the axis that is up on the screen, so in an oblique view it brings the horizon with it; hold Alt when you want to bring the far side of a building towards you without losing the inclination. Only the horizontal movement counts — the vertical is ignored, because Z is a single axis. It works inside a draw tool too, without closing the command, exactly like the Shift gesture below.
• Shift + right-button drag while a draw tool is active — rotates, taking its pivot under the cursor as usual, without closing the command: the polyline stays open and the vertex you are about to place stays where it is while the view turns around it. Shift is what makes the difference: the right button on its own belongs to the command and closes the entity (see the note below), so hold Shift before you press it and the command never sees the click.
• While a draw tool is active, MMB drag orbits instead of panning; the rubber band and command stay live when you release the button.
• Ctrl + LMB drag while drawing also orbits (StereoCAD-style) without placing a vertex.
• While a pivot session is active, an RGB axis gizmo (X/Y/Z) is drawn at the pivot to show the current orientation frame.

Performance while orbiting

During Shift+MMB drag the cloud temporarily uses a coarser level-of-detail so rotation stays fluid on large datasets. When you release the middle button, full resolution is restored automatically (same behaviour as pan/zoom). When you zoom far away from the subject, the cloud deliberately drops detail for navigation; close-up restitution keeps the high-detail LOD and transitions progressively as you move away from the subject.

End the session

• T (Top / WCS) restores plan framing when you return to cartographic work.
• Esc cancels the current CAD command; it has no effect on the orbit, which owns no state between one drag and the next.

Older versions used the G key to place the pivot before rotating. It is no longer needed — the drag does it — and is no longer listed among the shortcuts. The key still answers for anyone who has it in their fingers.

9.2.1 Multiview — the drawing workbench

The working view is nearly always looking straight down, and from there elevation cannot be judged: a vertex thirty centimetres above the roof and a vertex sitting on the roof occupy the same pixel. View → Multiview opens the panel that answers that question, and around that answer it gathers the drawing work that needs the answer. It draws nothing on its own initiative and changes nothing by itself: everything it writes, you asked for.

Six tabs, and what they share

The panel is divided into tabs, one per kind of object you deliver: Roof (pitches, eave, foot, walls — all parts of one object, so one tab), Road, Polyline, Spline, Ellipse and Rectangle. Modes inside a tab are ways of drawing that object, never a different object.

The point and the two views live below the tabs, not inside one of them. They are the panel's answer, not the roof's: a point is acquired by drawing anything, so the coordinates, the elevation field, the offset, the Options and the two rendered views stay on screen whichever tab you are on. So does the loupe checkbox, which is needed while you aim.

Leaving a tab stops the command that tab started. A tab is a command: leaving one with its command still armed would have you drawing one thing while looking at another. Every drawing command is stopped on a tab change — the application's own (pitch, eave, road) and the engine's, which are reset the way Esc resets them.

Two conditions before it will work

Multiview reads elevation off the rendered frame — depth taken from the image and converted back into coordinates. Two things make that reading wrong without looking wrong, so the panel refuses to work while either holds, showing a translucent cover over its own content with the reason written on it:

• The view must be nadir (looking straight down, within 1°). Off nadir, the few pixels a sample reads can land on a surface that is not the one under the cursor; the cover tells you how many degrees the view is tilted. The title bar stays clear of the cover, so you can always close the panel.
• Vertical exaggeration must be 1×. This one the application enforces for you: opening Multiview holds exaggeration at 1.0× for as long as it stays open, and an amber line in the panel says so and names the value it will restore when you close it. Your saved setting is never changed.

While the cover is up no capture is taken, so a tilted view also costs nothing.

The two views

The panel shows the last acquired point — the point a draw command actually consumed, object snap included — from two real photographic views, both 45° above the horizon, rendered by the same engine as the main view rather than calculated from a list of points. Each carries the point theme, the point size, the LOD and the streaming of the real view, and shows the cloud's true colour where available. The bearing of each view, in degrees from north, is written in its corner.

• The bearings are chosen by looking at the cloud. Thirty-six candidate bearings are scored against the point cloud: for each one, the line of sight from the point to the eye is tested, and the points that lie within a thin cylinder around it are counted as obstacles. The two clearest win, and they are kept at least 60° apart — two views ten degrees from each other say nothing more than one. When nothing is in the way — an open roof, the normal case — every candidate ties, and rather than let the views wander for no reason the panel keeps your own bearing and your bearing plus 90°. The mechanism only engages when there is a real obstacle to avoid. The result, with the obstacle counts that justified it, is printed under the option so you can judge the choice instead of trusting it.
• The 3 cm magenta sphere — the acquired point is drawn as a sphere 3 cm across, to scale, in magenta: no cloud produces that colour, so it never blends into the points. It is a ruler, not a pointer. If the cloud surface covers it, the point is on the surface; if it floats two diameters above it, that is six centimetres. A thin ring with four ticks sits outside the disc — that is how you find it and grab it, and it never falsifies the measurement.
• The elevation line — a magenta line crosses each view at the point's height, labelled with the elevation in project coordinates. It is how you see at a glance whether the point sits on the surface or floats above it.
• The pitch outlines are drawn on the views. Every pitch outline near the point is projected into each view through the very matrix that produced that frame, so the outlines fall on the points that surround them. The part of an outline that is hidden behind the roof in that view is drawn faint rather than removed: it says the edge is there and where, without pretending it is in front. A dot marks each vertex, because on a long edge a vertex is otherwise indistinguishable from the segment. The outlines are re-read from the drawing every frame, so a vertex you have just moved appears immediately.
• Correcting the point — drag the sphere in either view and the vertex follows it, resolved from the two directions that view actually shows (its own bearing and the vertical) together. The drawing changes when you release, so one correction is one undo step. The gesture always answers: the sphere goes where you put it. What can fail is writing it, because a vertex a running command still holds is not an entity yet — except while an eave outline or a pitch face is being drawn, where the vertex lives in the application itself and always accepts the correction. When writing fails the panel says so in one line, and finishing the polyline makes the correction land.
• Zoom & pan — the mouse wheel zooms into the image already captured (1× to 24×, anchored under the cursor), the middle mouse button drags it; both apply to both views together, since they show the same point at the same resolution. A view opens centred on the point and stays centred as you zoom further in. Double-click the middle button to reset.
• Orienting the set — drag with the left button anywhere except the sphere to turn both views together, keeping their separation; useful to line one of them up with a wall. Turning them by hand switches off the automatic choice for that drag.

A capture is two off-screen renders with the tile selection redone for each pose, and on an area not already in cache it can take a moment; the panel covers itself with a progress message while it works, and does not re-capture on every small adjustment — only once the point, the radius or the bearing has settled. When the capture finishes, the tile selection is put back to the operator's own camera: without that the main view would keep drawing the handful of tiles chosen for a five-metre close-up, which is exactly what used to make the cloud go coarse after every capture.

The point, in numbers

• X, Y, Z of the last acquired point, in project world coordinates.
• Z — the elevation as an editable field. Type the value you want and the vertex takes it: on a roof edge with a known height, typing is exact where dragging is a negotiation.
• Offset — a signed displacement in metres applied to the elevation, for when you know the correction ("this is 40 cm too low") rather than the answer.

The cursor loupe

Vertical loupe on the cursor — a checkbox in the panel, View → Cursor loupe, or Ctrl+Alt+L. The three are one command, not three copies of it: whichever you use, the checkbox and the menu tick follow, and the key can be reassigned from the keyboard shortcuts dialog like any other. It opens a small round window beside the cursor showing a vertical section of the cloud through the cursor: the horizontal axis runs along the section, the vertical axis is elevation, and a slab of ±35 cm around the cursor is kept, so you see the profile of the surface the point is about to land on. A crosshair with a filled dot marks the exact point — the arms say where it is, the dot says which it is — and the elevation is written under the disc.

It is a real render of the cloud, not a drawing, and it follows the cursor. It also updates while you nudge the elevation with Shift+wheel (fine) or Ctrl+wheel (coarse), so you can watch the point rise onto the surface instead of guessing. It sits beside the cursor, never on top of it: covering the point you are aiming at would make it useless exactly when it is needed.

Roof tab — drawing the roof

The commands for a roof are here, next to the views that check them.

• Draw pitch face / Stop drawing pitches — starts (and stops) the pitch face command. While it runs the button turns amber. Each closed pitch immediately starts a new one, so a whole roof is drawn without touching the panel again.
• Filled (solid face) — the pitch is delivered as a filled solid instead of a plain outline, with a dark border added on top so its shape reads against a dull fill colour.
• Semi-transparent 3D faces — dithers every filled face so the cloud and anything behind it stay visible through it.
• Free vertices onto the pitch plane — described in 13.7; from the fourth vertex on, a vertex you did not fix yourself takes its elevation from the plane of the pitch rather than from the cloud sample under the cursor.
• Eave layer and Pitch layer — the layers assigned to those entities (defaults GRONDA and FALDA), not whichever layer happens to be current. Both persistent.

Polyline, Spline, Ellipse, Rectangle — the CAD's own commands

These four tabs contain no geometry of their own, on purpose. The engine already draws a polyline, a spline, an ellipse and a rectangle, with its own snap, grips, rubber band, polar tracking and keyboard input; re-doing them in the application would mean losing all of that and rewriting what already works. So each tab does two things: it sets the layer and it starts the native command. Everything after that is the CAD's.

• Layer — a field per tab, persistent, created if it does not exist. Changing it while a command is running re-applies it, so the change takes effect instead of being silently refused.
• Polyline — a Closed checkbox, not a choice between two polylines: a polyline is open, and you close it. Ticking it while drawing restarts the command closed.
• Spline — its own tab, because in the engine it is its own entity with its own command: it is not a mode of the polyline, and you cannot switch between them half way through.
• Ellipse — the engine exposes a single ellipse command, so there is one mode here and none invented on top of it.
• Rectangle — two modes, and they are the two the engine has: opposite corners, or three points for a rotated rectangle. The mode is named in the button, because it is persistent and a button that always reads the same lets you draw the wrong thing for days without noticing.
• The button says what state you are in — amber and Stop drawing… while a command of that tab is running, and pressing it stops the command. Whether one is running is asked of the engine: a polyline tool re-arms itself after each entity, so the application's own bookkeeping cannot answer it.

Our own mark, on top of the engine's rubber band. The picked points carry the same sign as pitch, eave and road — light blue, a filled dot per vertex — so the panel speaks one language. Nothing is re-drawn: every time the engine consumes a point it says so, and that point is echoed. For polyline and spline the chain between the points and the live segment to the cursor are drawn too; for the rotated rectangle and the ellipse only the points are, because their shape depends on the order in which the engine asks for its data and a guessed preview would argue with the real one.

The right button closes the current entity and starts another of the same kind — the tool re-arms itself — so the echoed mark clears and starts again with it. To turn the model without closing what you are drawing, hold Shift and drag with the right button (see Orbit on three axes).

Roof tab — buildings

The panel reports how many buildings the pitches form and how many are still in draft, and carries the settings that turn a draft into drawn geometry (13.8 and 13.9).

• Eave overhang (m) — how far the foot is set in from the outline, and how wide the eave soffit is. Persistent, default 0.50 m.
• Foot layer and Wall layer — defaults PIEDE and PARETI.
• Confirm building N — writes the eave outline, the foot and the walls for the building you have selected, and marks it confirmed. There is deliberately no "confirm all": a button that writes geometry for buildings you are not looking at is a button that gets pressed by mistake.

Roof tab — correcting a building already drawn

Click the numbered circle of a building and it enters edit: its pitches are taken out of the drawing and held by the application, where they behave like a pitch you are still drawing — an elastic outline, with no engine in between. They return to the drawing when you leave or confirm, so a correction in progress never leaves half-written geometry behind and the fills are not rebuilt at every gesture.

Leaving loses nothing. Leave edit puts the pitches back as you left them; Confirm does the same and regenerates the eave, the foot and the walls. Saving or closing the project hands the session over first, so a building cannot disappear from the drawing because a panel was open. The panel says which building is in edit, and puts the way out next to the button that deletes that building's pitches.

The tools are where your hand is. With a building in edit, holding the right button still on a handle opens the editing menu — delete vertex, split edge, delete pitch, undo. The right button dragged still orbits, so the menu opens only when the pointer has not moved.

Esc during a handle drag abandons it and puts the handle back where it was, instead of having to set it down somewhere wrong and move it back by eye. Everything written here can be taken back with Undo geometry edit.

The vertical profile

Under the two views, across the width of the window, a strip shows the cloud cut vertically through the work in progress. It is drawn as a profile line, the way a survey section is read, and not as a stretched picture of the slice.

• What it cuts. The section runs through the plan centroid of the building being worked on and is twice its largest dimension long, so the surroundings are visible and not only the house. While you review vertices one by one it follows the picked vertex instead: correcting an eave while looking at the ridge helps nobody. Direction and length stay the building's, so two sections of the same house remain comparable.
• Where it points. With pitches present the profile orients itself across them — along the slope, which is where the shape of a roof shows. It follows the pitch you are still drawing as well, which is when the profile is worth most: the slope is being decided. Drag the bearing to turn it.
• Cross section. A second line cuts perpendicular to the first — to the current segment while you are drawing — so both directions are read at once.
• Slice sets how thick a slab of cloud is collapsed into the profile.

When the profile cannot follow the pitches, the strip says why — how many pitches it found on the layer and what was missing — instead of quietly falling back to an arbitrary axis.

The strip can be put away when the page is small and that space is worth more to the drawing — see The strips at the bottom of the page.

The strips at the bottom of the page

Three strips share the bottom of the window, and none of them is opened by hand: each appears with the work it belongs to. The vertical profile comes with Multiview, the breakline strip with the breakline tool, the volume profiles with a computed measurement. Each is a little over two hundred points tall — on a laptop screen a fifth of the page — and the first two can cover each other, because both sit on the same edge.

So each of them can be turned off, and stays off: the choice is a preference of yours, not a state of the job, and it survives the next computation and the next start. Each menu entry carries the name of the window it shows, not a nickname for it.

Closing the breakline strip does not disarm the tool: the preview of crest and toe keeps following the cursor on the drawing, and arming, the automatic run and the undo stay in the Terrain menu. Two of its buttons — the work area and the run along the guide — live only in the strip, so bring it back when you need them.

A volume measurement no longer forces its strip open either: if you closed it, computing another volume leaves it closed.

Options

• Radius — the area each view frames, 1 to 30 m, default 5 m. The camera never frames less than a floor distance, so a badly mis-placed point still shows the real surface around it.
• Pick the two viewpoints automatically — the bearing choice described above. On by default, persistent. Switching it off returns to fixed bearings (yours and yours plus 90°) and re-takes immediately — the way out if the choice ever misbehaves, without waiting for a new build.

Opening and closing

Multiview is docked, not floating: it takes the band beside the mono view, the same one the Zenith Overview uses, and it cannot be dragged or resized except by the splitter on its inner edge — which remembers how wide you left it. Because that band holds one panel at a time, opening Multiview closes the Overview and opening the Overview closes Multiview. That is the same rule the station strip and the sheet index already follow, and it is why the two share one button column.

Having no title bar, it has no close cross. It opens and closes from its button in the top-left corner of the mono view — see 8.6, The three window buttons — from View, or from its shortcut; where you left it is remembered, and it stays closed at the next start until you ask for it again. While the panel is closed that button turns amber and explains itself if vertical exaggeration is active, because opening Multiview holds exaggeration at 1.0× for as long as it stays open.

Gone in 4.0.0. Fix vertex has been removed: it did not work, and its job is done better by the pitch handles, which are always on the drawing and need no command. Confirm all buildings in draft has been removed for the reason given above. Elevation hysteresis has been removed together with the second, independent elevation sample it existed to rescue: a click now takes the elevation you can see (13.7).

9.3 The 3D cursor & elevation (Z)

While digitizing, the cursor carries a 3D object point (the point reported by the status bar, the stereo coordinatograph and the stereo reticle — always the same XYZ). You set that elevation by snapping to the cloud or by adjusting it manually; how the elevation behaves while you move the mouse in planimetry depends on which of the two cursor models is active (see 9.3.1).

You set elevation by snapping to the cloud or by adjusting it directly:

• Z — one-shot snap of cursor Z to the cloud under the pointer (also used by the Cloud Z object snap at pick time and by the trackball top-right button). Does not lock elevation for following vertices.
• Shift+Z — Z Anchor: sample the cloud under the cursor and lock that elevation for following vertices until pressed again (see 9.4).
• Ctrl+Shift+Z — toggle AUTO-Z (idle cloud elevation snap): when enabled, the cursor elevation follows the cloud surface after the pointer stops moving (~150 ms).
• Ctrl+Shift+Alt+G — toggle GND-Z (ground-biased Z for AUTO-Z; requires AUTO-Z ON). See 10.2.
• Ctrl+Shift+Alt+H — toggle WIRE-Z (collimate on the surface nearest the eye; requires AUTO-Z)
• Ctrl+Shift+Alt+A — Draw overhead line (two clicks on the wire; arms WIRE-Z with it)
• Ctrl+Alt+B — Build ground DTM (CSF).
• Ctrl+Alt+D — toggle Overview DTM layer.
• Ctrl+Shift+Q — toggle Constant cursor elevation (fixed world Z while moving planimetrically) vs floating-mark (constant view depth). See 9.3.1.
• Shift+wheel — nudge cursor Z by the fine step (default 0.01 units).
• Ctrl+wheel — nudge cursor Z by the rapid step (default 0.10 units).

The current cursor Z is shown in the Inspector, with a Reset Z control.

CAD geometry is fixed. Changing cursor elevation (wheel, Z, trackball ball) moves only the digitizing cursor — lines, polylines and other entities stay at their real elevation on screen. The CAD engine receives the cursor Z only when you pick a point (click or vertex confirm).

The mark under scattered canopy (3.89)

Digitizing on the cloud surface. When AUTO-Z is on or you are placing vertices with Cloud Z, StereoCloud3D first looks for a real, geometrically supported surface along the cursor ray: starting from the point nearest the camera within a small radius of the ray, it fits a plane through that point's own neighbourhood and accepts the first plane that at least half of its neighbours actually lie on. The elevation is that plane's intersection with the ray, so the mark is always under the cursor — obliquely as well as looking straight down — and a few scattered fronds or a thin patch of canopy in front of a roof no longer pull the mark onto them, because a scatter of points does not support a plane the way a roof does. Where nothing under the cursor supports a plane (dense unbroken canopy, or nothing in the cloud at all), the mark falls back to the nearest cloud point, the same behaviour StereoCloud3D always had.

Idle elevation readout. When no CAD command is active and AUTO-Z is enabled, the status bar and coordinatograph can show the cloud elevation under the cursor, but only after the pointer stops moving for a short moment (~150 ms). While you move the mouse, the readout does not chase every pixel — this keeps navigation smooth. When AUTO-Z is off, manual Z (wheel, one-shot Z, Z Anchor) is preserved while hovering. During an active draw/modify command, elevation follows the normal CAD cursor rules instead. A ring around the mono cursor (and, in stereo, around each eye's mark) shows how much to trust the current elevation: its colour runs continuously from red (no supported plane was found — the mark fell back to the nearest point) through amber to green as the fraction of the local neighbourhood that actually supports the plane rises. It is not a green/not-green signal — a thin margin above the acceptance threshold reads amber, a clean, well-supported roof reads green. Once locked, the WCS readout and stereo coordinatograph keep the same sampled point until the pointer moves again.

On the cardinal wall view (MainMonoUcs), the on-screen cursor is a compact CAD cross with pick box (matching native StereoCAD), not a full-viewport hair cross.

9.3.1 Constant elevation vs floating-mark

In an oblique georef view (MainMonoUcs), once you have set a cursor elevation and AUTO-Z / Cloud Z snap are off, StereoCloud3D can keep that mark under the pointer in two different ways. The choice is stored in settings and is the default for new installations.

How to switch

• Draw → Snap → Constant cursor elevation (fixed Z) — checkbox; shown with a tick when mode A is active.
• Ctrl+Shift+Q — toggle (rebindable in Keyboard Shortcuts).
• The status line reports which mode is active after each toggle. The choice is saved between sessions.

When each mode applies

9.4 Object snaps

Open Draw → Snap or the Object Snap toolbar to enable running snaps. A master Object Snap toggle turns them all on/off. Available modes:

EndpointMidpointCenter IntersectionNearestPoint PerpendicularTangentCloud Z

Cloud Z snaps a vertex's height to the point cloud at pick time — the key to fast, accurate restitution. Like the other running object snaps, it is applied when you click or confirm the next CAD point. When the cloud pick succeeds during drawing, the mono cursor shows a green ring and the sampled elevation as confirmation.

Z Anchor (Shift+Z) stores the elevation of the cloud point under the mono cursor and assigns that exact Z to following vertices until Shift+Z is pressed again. While active, AUTO-Z and Cloud Z object snap are suspended, a red anchor marks the sampled point, and the cursor shows only the locked numeric elevation. Use this for repeated points that must share one quota. (Release 3.19 and earlier used bare Z for anchor; upgrade users should reset keyboard shortcuts or rebind if an old Z binding still toggles anchor.)

9.4.1 What the snap aims at (Cloud / Vectors / My choice)

The modes above are independent switches, so declaring “right now I want the vectors” used to mean turning several of them off one at a time. Three entries at the top of Draw → Snap do it in one click:

• Cloud — snapping to the cloud surface only. The entity snaps go off.
• Vectors — snapping to drawing entities only, and it brings back your entity snaps, not a set chosen for you. Only if you have never picked any does it start from the CAD default.
• My choice — the combination you built by hand, returned exactly as it was.

These are presets over the modes below them, not a new mode: nothing is added to how snapping works. My choice is what makes the other two usable — switch to Cloud for a roof pitch, come back, and your configuration is there again instead of having to be rebuilt one switch at a time. Any mode you toggle by hand becomes the remembered combination, and so does Restore defaults.

They live in the menu and not on the toolbar on purpose: they set the very switches the bar already shows, and sitting directly above them they read as a second, competing control rather than as a shortcut over the first.

Arming Cloud against a hidden cloud is refused, as arming Cloud Z alone always was. If your own combination contains Cloud Z and the cloud is hidden, My choice comes back without it and says so, rather than restoring a snap that cannot bite.

9.4.2 Which coordinates the snap imposes (XYZ / XY / Z)

A snap normally hands the vertex all three coordinates of the point it found. In survey work that is often more than you want: you may need the planimetry of an existing vertex at the elevation you are already digitizing at, or the elevation of an eave line while you click the planimetry freely. The filter beside the OSNAP button decides which of the two an object snap is allowed to write:

• XYZ — the snapped point as the CAD engine returns it. Planimetry and elevation both come from the entity. This is the default and the usual CAD behaviour.
• XY only — the snap gives the planimetry; the elevation stays the one that governs the cursor (cloud, Z Anchor, wheel). Trace over an existing drawing while keeping your own quota.
• Z only — the snap gives the elevation of the entity under the pointer; the planimetry stays where you click. Draw at the height of an existing eave, ridge or cable without being pulled onto it. Available in the georeferenced 3D view, the only one where elevation and planimetry come from different sources.

The button shows the state in force — XYZ, XY or Z — and each click moves to the next one. It is lit whenever a filter is actually in the way, and amber when Z only is chosen in a view that cannot apply it. The same three states are in Draw → Snap → Coordinates the snap imposes, on Ctrl+Alt+X, and on the command line as SNAPXYZ, SNAPXY and SNAPZ. Your choice is saved between sessions.

With Z only, hovering an entity moves the cursor readout to that entity's elevation while the mark stays under the pointer: what you see is what the click will write. Move away from the entity and the elevation returns to whatever was driving it before — AUTO-Z, the anchor or the wheel.

9.5 Polar tracking

Polar tracking helps while drawing lines and polylines: when the next segment is near 0° or 90° relative to the previous segment, a dashed guide appears and the cursor magnetizes to that direction. This is separate from object snaps (perpendicular to an existing entity is a snap mode, not polar tracking).

• POLAR checkbox on the Object Snap toolbar, or Draw → Snap → Polar tracking.
• F8 — toggle polar tracking on/off (also PON on the command line).

Default: on, relative angles in 90° steps. Your choice is saved in settings between sessions, and it applies to whichever drawing you are working on — the georeferenced 3D drawing as well as a sheet. The angles are planimetric (world XY): polar fixes the direction of the next segment, while its elevation stays whatever Cloud Z or AUTO-Z is giving it. A small on-cursor tooltip reads out the polar distance and angle.

9.6 Trackball navigation (Kensington / Logitech)

StereoCloud3D supports professional trackballs for 3D cursor Z, view rotation, and quick actions. Recommended: Kensington Expert Mouse (wired) or Expert Trackball (wireless) — large ball, scroll ring, four buttons (USB 047D). Also supported: Logitech ERGO M575 (successor to the M570, still sold new), Wireless Trackball M570 and Trackman Marble (discontinued but widely available refurbished/used; USB 046D). Use any of these with a normal mouse for pan and CAD pick.

• Ball — raises or lowers the 3D cursor Z (the elevation quota used while digitizing). The on-screen pointer stays fixed so the view does not jitter.
• Scroll ring (Kensington) or wheel (Logitech) — changes the Z action speed (shown in the Inspector and trackball settings; no longer drawn on the stereo coordinatograph).
• Mouse MMB + ball — hold the middle button on your mouse (without dragging the mouse) and roll the trackball with the other hand. Rotates cloud and CAD live around the current orbit pivot (yaw/pitch), using the same native CAD/cloud orbit host as Shift+MMB.
• Alt + ball — same rotation if you prefer a keyboard modifier.
• Hardware buttons — Kensington: four assignable buttons (defaults below). Logitech thumb models (M570/M575): left/right map to the bottom-left / bottom-right slots. Trackman Marble: four buttons (same assignment grid).

Open Browser → Navigation → Trackball settings… to enable the device (trackball support is off at startup until you turn it on here — improves stability on some PCs), invert ball/ring sense, reset the speed multiplier, and assign buttons. Default assignments:

• Top-left — pan the view to the cursor XY (one click; recenters while keeping the world point under the cursor).
• Top-right — snap Z to the cloud surface under the cursor.
• Bottom-left — toggle cloud visibility.
• Bottom-right — toggle CAD visibility.

Preferences are saved in settings.json (kensingtonTrackballEnabled, speed, invert, and the four button assignments).

9.7 Input recovery & view realignment

Release 3.20 adds recovery commands for sessions where the mono cursor disappears, navigation keys (T, Z) stop responding, or pan/orbit feels stuck (often after Alt+Tab or focus loss during MMB drag).

• Unlock input (Ctrl+Shift+R) — View → Unlock input or the Recover input shortcut. Ends active pan and orbit drags, cancels UCS-orient preview and orbit-pivot sessions, closes escapable modals (wizard, new-project dialog, etc.), invalidates cursor caches and reclaims keyboard focus on the main window. Does not change your current orientation, zoom or framing.
• Restore view and alignment — View menu only (no default shortcut; assign in Keyboard Shortcuts if needed). Runs Sblocca input then the same full zenith reframe as T (Top / WCS): resets oblique orient to R=I, re-syncs cloud, CAD and stereo camera. Use when cloud and CAD have drifted apart after a partial orbit or pan — equivalent to a controlled T after unlocking input.

If you lose window focus while panning (MMB) or orbiting (G drag), StereoCloud3D automatically ends the stuck drag when focus returns — without resetting the view.

9.8 Measuring on the cloud

A consultation tool: it reads coordinates off the point cloud and shows numbers. It writes nothing — no CAD entity, no project data, no saved object. Closing the tool leaves the project exactly as it was.

Neither command has a keyboard shortcut by default; assign one in Keyboard Shortcuts if you use them often. The tool cannot be started while a CAD command is running, and it never takes a click away from a CAD or cloud tool that is already active. If it refuses to start — no cloud, or a CAD command still running — it says so in the Command Line.

Where the numbers appear

Starting either command opens the Measurement results panel, and that is where the measurement is read:

• Point info — X, Y and Z of the picked point, in project coordinates, to three decimals.
• Distance — both points in full, then 3D distance, Horizontal and Height difference. The height difference is signed: it is the second point minus the first, so it tells you which way the ground goes.
• Copy — puts the numbers on the clipboard, tab separated, so they paste into a spreadsheet as columns and into a report as text.
• Measure again — starts a fresh measurement of the same kind without going back to the menu.
• Clear — ends the tool, exactly like the menu item and like right-click.

While the tool is waiting for a click the panel says which click it is waiting for. Closing the panel does not end the measurement: Cloud → Measure → Measurement results brings it back with the numbers still there. Each result is also written to the Command Line, so a session of several measurements leaves a readable list.

The two points and the line between them are drawn on the main (mono) viewport, with the same numbers repeated beside the last point so you can read them without leaving the cloud. They do not appear in the external stereo output.

If there is no cloud fragment under the pixel you clicked — a gap between points, or background — the tool says so and waits for another click.

9.9 Navigation trajectory

Draw a control polyline on the cloud and the camera will fly along it, at a speed you set in metres per second. The view axis stays horizontal, with heading along the path tangent (plan projection): grades change flying height, not pitch. Navigation itself runs in stereo. The trajectory (cyan/yellow) is drawn on the mono viewport while you author or pause it; during Play it is hidden so it does not sit in the stereo pair.

Open View → Toolbars… and tick Navigation.

1. Draw camera path... — if there is no ground DTM yet, StereoCloud3D builds one first (CSF on the Cloud AOI, or on the current view). Then click the path on the ground; each vertex is draped on the DTM. Right-click to finish. Two points are enough, three if the path is closed. Undo point, or Backspace, removes the point you just placed.
2. Closed — the path joins its end back to its start and the travel is continuous. Left open, reaching the end restarts from the beginning.
3. Speed — metres per second. The camera covers that distance along the path itself, so it does not speed up where the control points are far apart.
4. Offset from ground — metres above the DTM. The drawn path stays on the terrain; this offset is the flying height of the camera.
5. Look left/right — yaw while the flight is running (or paused). Negative looks left of the path, positive looks right; 0 follows the tangent. The view stays horizontal. Use the slider or the Left / Right arrow keys (5° per press; hold to keep turning). Stop returns the offset to 0. This look is not saved with the path.
6. Play, Pause, Stop, Restart, and the direction button to travel the other way. The slider shows and sets the distance travelled.

Pause and Stop are different on purpose. Pause holds the camera where it is, so you can look around and use Point info and Distance from that viewpoint, then carry on. Stop ends the flight and hands the camera back to the normal view exactly as you left it.

The drawn path is saved with the project, in navigation/trajectory.json under the project folder, in project coordinates. Dialog position, open/closed state, speed and ground offset are remembered in the application settings so they survive closing the project and restarting StereoCloud3D. Opening a project that already has a saved path still uses that file's speed and offset for that project.

Flying the trajectory changes nothing but the viewpoint. The drawing, the technical stereo view and all CAD behaviour are untouched, and CAD restitution stays refused while the Navigation view is on.

10.0 Cloud classification

Use Cloud → Classification to write ASPRS classes into the loaded cloud octree (in place). The submenu is ordered by the recommended run sequence:

1. Ground (class 2) — cloth filter; required before most other passes.
2. Buildings (class 6) — roofs measured against class 2.
3. Roads (11) / Water (9) — surfaces among ground points.
4. Masts and poles (15) / Overhead wires (14) — vertical features on unclassified points.
5. Vegetation (3/4/5) — run last on remaining unclassified points.
6. Mark noise (7/18) — flags outliers; nothing is deleted (hide classes in Cloud Visualization).

With several cloud layers, each pass opens a submenu to pick the layer. After a pass, reload colour mode Classification in Cloud Visualization to see the result (RGB colouring hides classes). Commands are also listed under Keyboard Shortcuts (no default key bindings; assign if needed).

10.0.0a Saved classifications — choosing one, and throwing it away

Every classification run saves the result as a version, listed in the Display panel under Classification version and in the Scene tree under the cloud's Classification folder. Choosing one rewrites the class byte of every point, so the cloud goes back to what that run decided — it is the data that changes, not just the colouring.

A version costs one byte per point: about 17 MB on a 226-million-point cloud, and a run leaves one behind every time. To remove one, press Delete next to it and confirm. It cannot be undone: those bytes are the only copy of that run's answer.

Two are never offered for deletion:

• the active one — deleting it would leave the label pointing at bytes that no longer exist. Activate another version first, then delete it;
• Classification — Original, the backup taken before the first pass ever ran. It is the only record of how the cloud arrived, and a delivered classification cannot be recomputed.

10.0.0 Classify cloud — the whole chain in one run

Cloud → Classification → Classify cloud… runs every pass in the required order, so you do not have to remember it. The dialog asks for three things:

The run is a background job with a progress list, one line per pass and its point count; the Command Line keeps the same record. Nothing is deleted at any point: noise is flagged, and you hide it from Cloud Visualization.

10.0.1 Surface models (DTM / DSM / nDSM)

A whole-chain run (Classify cloud) does not only write the class byte. Once the passes are done it writes three georeferenced Float32 GeoTIFFs into <layer>/surfaces, at 0.5 m cells:

Empty cells carry NoData, never 0, which would read as sea level. No coordinate system is attached: the rasters carry the correct world geotransform and nothing more, so tell your GIS which system the survey is in.

Each raster is filed in the Scene Tree under Products → Surface models, with the run that made it, its cell size and its path. Re-running the classification overwrites the same files and updates the same three entries rather than stacking duplicates.

Looking at one. Tick a raster's box in the tree, or right-click it and choose Show in the Zenith Overview. It is read off disk in the background and shaded under the CAD in the Zenith Overview, whose header names the raster on display. There is one raster layer, so showing a second one replaces the first. A block wider than 2500 cells is averaged down for display; the log line says by how much.

The DTM is also a measuring surface. Showing dtm.tif makes it the session terrain, so GND-Z samples it — the same state as a Build ground DTM (CSF) run, without the wait. A classification run adopts its own terrain automatically for the same reason. A DSM or nDSM is only ever displayed: it is not a ground reference, and GND-Z keeps snapping to the terrain.

10. Cloud visualization

Open Cloud → Cloud Visualization… (Ctrl+Shift+L) for point color mode, point size and related display options. Settings are saved with the project (and in app settings where applicable).

Color modes include RGB, elevation, intensity and Classification. In Classification mode an ASPRS legend lists standard LAS classes; use the per-class checkboxes to show or hide points (for example ground only, or buildings without vegetation). Classes with no points in the loaded tiles remain listed but contribute nothing until classified data is present.

10.1 Color modes

Modes whose attribute is missing in the data are shown as unavailable.

10.2 Elevation range (automatic, spike-resistant)

Elevation coloring needs a min/max height. Real clouds often contain a few spikes (a stray point far above or below the surface) that would otherwise wash out the ramp. StereoCloud3D therefore computes a robust range from the 2nd–98th percentile of the height distribution, so the colors span the meaningful terrain rather than the outliers.

10.3 Point size & cache

• Point size — on-screen size of each point (1–64).
• Cache tiles — how many tiles stay resident in memory (default 32). Larger values reduce re-loading at the cost of memory.

Fast cloud rendering

Point clouds indexed as an octree are drawn from buffers that stay on the graphics card: each node of the tree is uploaded once and kept there, so changing the view only re-issues the draws instead of rebuilding and re-uploading every visible point. Navigation stops costing in proportion to how many points are on screen, which is what makes rotation and zoom on a large cloud feel immediate.

There is nothing to switch on: it is how an octree cloud is drawn. A project built on grid tiles keeps the classic path. CAD snapping, cloud picking, measurements and the tile data are the same either way.

If the cloud misbehaves on a particular machine — a graphics driver, an unusual card — support can start the application once with the environment variable SC3D_CLOUD_RESIDENT_GL=0, which restores the classic rendering path so work can continue while the cause is found.

How much detail actually reaches the screen (4.7)

For each view the renderer chooses which nodes of the octree it needs, and then holds those nodes ready to draw. Until 4.7 those two quantities were governed by different limits: the choice could run up to 40 000 nodes while only 16 384 could be held, and the difference was quietly set aside. In an oblique view at middle zoom — where the line of sight runs along the ground and collects nodes at every distance — that meant 59% of what had been chosen never appeared, and the depth of detail stopped two levels short of what the data contains.

The two limits are now the same number, so a node that was chosen is a node that is drawn. There is nothing to set. A large cloud in an oblique view uses roughly a third of a gigabyte more memory and draws at the same rate; while the extra nodes are being read for the first time you may notice a brief pause, once.

The same mismatch was what stopped the stereo image in oblique views. The compositor waited for the set-aside nodes to arrive, and they were never going to: they had been given up on, not queued. In a zenith view, or zoomed close in, the selection stayed under the limit and the freeze never happened — which is why it looked like a stereo fault rather than a cloud one.

10.4 Gaussian splatting and Eye-Dome Lighting

Two visual enhancers for dense point-cloud interpretation, both reachable from the Representation dialog (and still from the Cloud → Performance menu):

• Gaussian splatting draws each point as a soft, screen-space Gaussian splat that blends with its neighbours, filling the gaps between measured points into a continuous surface. It improves apparent surface continuity without changing CAD snapping, cloud picking or the underlying tile data. (It is the evolution of the earlier “Pro surfel visual overlay”.)
• Eye-Dome Lighting applies a depth-aware post-process to the cloud texture. It darkens local depth discontinuities so edges, steps, cavities and façade details read more clearly even when the cloud has no normals.

EDL is visual-only. It is applied per cloud framebuffer (mono and each stereo eye) before CAD vectors are composited, so CAD lines remain crisp and are not shaded. The controls are:

10.5 Representation dialog

Cloud → Representation — also reached by right-clicking the cloud in the 3D view — gathers the point cloud's display controls in one place: the color mode, point size and the two enhancers above (Gaussian splatting and Eye-Dome Lighting). It is the cloud-only part of the full Display dialog, brought within one click of the cloud you are looking at, so you can change how the points read without leaving the view.

The classification, intensity and RGB colouring described above are untouched by these two toggles: Gaussian splatting and EDL change how the points are drawn, not what colour carries the data.

10.1 Zenith Overview

View → Zenith Overview (Ctrl+Shift+O) docks a WCS plan panel on the left of the mono viewport, separated by a draggable vertical splitter (the split ratio is remembered between sessions). It always shows CAD in world coordinates (plan / zenith), preferring georeferenced imagery under the drawing when available. The main mono viewport keeps focus for digitizing and can remain oblique while the overview stays top-down.

• Fixed crosshair, moving map — a crosshair stays fixed at the centre of the panel while the imagery and CAD map follow the live mono cursor. The scale matches the mono view exactly: a metre is the same number of pixels in both panes, so an entity is the same size in the overview as it is in mono. The overview therefore covers less ground than mono whenever it is the smaller panel — it is a window at mono's scale, not a reduction of the whole view.
• Live entities — entities you draw in the mono CAD appear in the overview: its plan drawing is refreshed from a snapshot of the live drawing whenever the entity count changes, without disturbing the mono view.
• Imagery — while the overview is open, WCS imagery continues streaming even if the mono view is oblique, and tiles fill the overview extent.
• DTM layer (3.24) — after Cloud → Build ground DTM (CSF)…, enable the DTM checkbox in the Overview header (or Ctrl+Alt+D) to show a ground hillshade between imagery and CAD. Opacity is adjustable next to the checkbox.

Use the overview as a situational map while digitizing walls or roofs in an oriented UCS. Drag the splitter to resize the panel.

10.2 GND-Z and ground DTM

GND-Z is a modifier of AUTO-Z: turn AUTO-Z on first (Ctrl+Shift+Z), then enable GND-Z from the Snap or Cloud menu, the Object Snap toolbar, or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+G. Near zenith (view looking down), elevation prefers ASPRS ground-like classes (2 Ground, 8 Model key-point, 11 Road surface) when present in the neighbourhood; otherwise the lowest Z in about 1 m XY. Steep / façade views keep the normal RANSAC plane∩ray path.

Build the terrain model (CSF) (Terrain menu or Ctrl+Alt+B) runs a Cloth Simulation Filter on the Cloud AOI (preferred) or the current view extents. A progress dialog shows extract and CSF stages; Cancel discards the run. The resulting height raster is kept for the session: when GND-Z + AUTO-Z are on and the cursor is inside DTM coverage, elevation samples the raster (bilinear) instead of a live neighbourhood query. Discard the session terrain in the same menu drops it, and so does closing the project. A terrain built by the classification chain and written next to the layer is loaded instead with Terrain → Load the project terrain: each terrain on disk is listed with its size, and the one you pick becomes the session terrain that GND-Z, the contour lines and the volumes all sample.

10.3 WIRE-Z — collimating on a suspended line

WIRE-Z is the opposite reading of the same cursor to GND-Z, and like it a modifier of AUTO-Z: turn AUTO-Z on first, then enable WIRE-Z from the Draw → Snap, the Object Snap toolbar (beside GND-Z), or with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+H. The two are exclusive — arming one puts the other down.

With WIRE-Z on, the digitizing elevation comes from the surface nearest the camera under the cursor instead of from the strongest plane in the neighbourhood. It applies to AUTO-Z and to Cloud Z alike, so a click cannot take one reading while the hovering cursor showed another.

Why it exists. The zenith view is the one that shows a whole overhead line at once, so it is the view this work is done from — and from directly above, the strongest plane under the cursor is always the road: a conductor is a handful of returns against thousands of asphalt ones. Pointing at a wire and getting the ground eight metres below it is a property of plane fitting, not a setting that can be tuned. A suspended object has no plane to find; what identifies it is that nothing lies between it and the eye.

It is not limited to power lines. Anything that hangs or overhangs — a cable, a gutter, an eave, the near face of a structure from a terrestrial station — is what WIRE-Z lands on, in aerial, mobile and terrestrial projects alike.

Armed automatically. Choosing the overhead line category in the extraction panel turns AUTO-Z and WIRE-Z on and puts GND-Z down, and says so in the status line. It is not put back when the tool is released: a snap that switched itself off again would be one you could not rely on across tools. The Snap submenu always shows which is armed.

10.4 Drawing an overhead line

Cloud → Draw overhead line (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+A) arms a two-click tool: click twice on the wire, along it. The two points are not a convenience — they state which conductor and which way it runs, and near a bundle no measurement can recover that from one click. The span is then followed by contiguity from returns to returns, fitted, and drawn on the conductor layer with its length, sag, apparent section and fit rms reported in the log.

Arming it also arms WIRE-Z, so the cursor lands on the wire instead of the ground under it. The same menu item disarms the tool; WIRE-Z stays as you left it.

It needs a point cloud and a drawing open, and nothing else — no mobile run, and no particular panel. Choose the view that shows what you are tracing: the zenith shows a whole line at once, which is why it is the usual one.

10.5 Terrain — contour lines, breaklines, volumes

The Terrain menu collects what concerns the ground surface, in the order the work is actually done. It needs a project open, and each group below needs the one above it:

None of these commands has a default key. All of them are in CAD → Keyboard Shortcuts… and can be bound there. GND-Z stays where it always was, under Snap: it is a snap, not a terrain function.

10.5.1 Contour lines

Terrain → Contour lines… traces the levels on the session terrain model and writes them into the drawing as polylines. The dialog holds what the drawing needs:

Undo the contour lines removes from the drawing exactly the lines the last run wrote. It is not a CAD undo: it erases those entities and nothing else.

If the dialog warns that the terrain is sparse, the raster has a height in too few cells: a contour segment needs four neighbouring cells with a height. Build the terrain on a tighter AOI, or with a coarser cell, before blaming the interval.

10.5.2 Breaklines

A breakline is where the ground stops being smooth: the crest and the toe of a bench, a quarry face, an embankment, a cut. A grid terrain rounds that edge off, and contours drawn on it climb over the crest instead of bending at it. These two commands find the edge on the points and write it into the drawing as polylines — crest and toe are always a pair, on layers of their own.

Breakline from a click… arms the tool. Click on a face where the ground steps down and the whole line comes out, from one end of the break to the other — not the piece under the cursor. The first click reads the points around it; after that the strip at the bottom shows, live under the cursor, the height of the step and the slope of the face, so you can see whether there is a break here before committing to it. When one end reports that it sits where the points read run out rather than where the face ends, click there to carry on.

Every break in the area… is the same engine without the clicks: it finds the faces itself over an area you draw (left click per corner, right click to close) or over the whole cloud when no area is drawn, and delivers crest and toe for every face the sections confirm, reporting how many knees out of how many sections held. A break already drawn is not drawn again, and Esc stops the run.

The strip can be closed without disarming the tool — see The strips at the bottom of the page.

Four numbers govern both, and all four are typed in the panel rather than guessed:

Undo the last breakline takes back the last pair, or the last run, and says how many are left from this session.

10.5.3 Volumes against a quoted polygon

Terrain → Volumes against a quoted polygon… (or type VOLUMI) measures cut and fill between the terrain model and an area you draw and quote yourself. It needs a terrain model and an open drawing.

1. Draw the area… — click its corners on the cloud; right-click or Enter closes it, Esc cancels it. The panel counts the vertices and the plan area as you go, and the last vertex can be taken back. A closed polyline already in the drawing can be adopted instead with Take the selected polyline.
2. Quote it. Every vertex arrives with the ground elevation sampled under it. Write the design Z over it in the table — vertex by vertex, or one value applied to all for a flat platform.
3. Compute. The calculation cell is yours to choose; the terrain's own cell is shown beside it, because a finer cell gives longer numbers, not truer ones.

The reference surface is the triangulation of your polygon, so every quoted vertex is honoured exactly. A least-squares plane through the same points would have thrown away the numbers the operator put there, which are the whole content of the measurement.

Two things are stated rather than hidden. Ground inside the area with no terrain underneath is reported in square metres and left out of the volumes instead of being guessed. And the share of the volume that rests on reconstructed terrain cells is given separately, with the part outside the surveyed area: a cubic metre over extrapolated ground is not worth one over measured ground.

Profiles opens the strip along the area (see The strips at the bottom of the page), optionally following the cursor, and the coloured blanket over the view shows where the difference is and how deep, at an opacity you set. Close command puts the drawn area, the blanket and the strip away without losing anything.

11. Cloud Performance

For very large clouds you can trade visual crispness against navigation smoothness with a single setting: Cloud → Performance. The choice is global and remembered between sessions. The settled LOD (once the camera stops) is intentionally non-linear: close to the subject it becomes dense quickly for restitution, while distant overviews are kept much coarser because they are navigation views, not drawing views.

What happens while the camera is moving (3.89) now differs by preset instead of being the same rule for all three. On Fast and Balanced the cloud is drawn at a coarser level of detail during pan, zoom and orbit, then one crisp full-resolution pass renders a fraction of a second after you stop — the momentary drop in density is what keeps the frame rate up while you move. On Quality the cloud instead stays at full resolution through the whole motion, orbit included: nothing degrades and nothing has to catch up once you stop, at the cost of doing the full-density work on every frame while navigating.

The Cloud menu also displays the active preset's live values (visible tiles per layer and motion level-of-detail bias) and current cache statistics (resident tiles, cache hits/misses).

Visual quality options in the same menu are independent from LOD. The surfel overlay increases point coverage, while Eye-Dome Lighting adds depth cues on the already rendered cloud texture. Both are saved in global settings and can be toggled without changing project geometry, CAD entities or pick behavior.

12. Stereoscopic viewing

The Stereo menu controls depth presentation. Stereo settings are saved with the project.

12.1 Quick start

1. Open a project with cloud (and CAD if needed).
2. Stereo → Stereo (or toolbar Stereo, Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S).
3. Stereo → Display layout — choose Mono, Stereo SBS (dual monitor), or PluraView (triple monitor), or cycle with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+H / toolbar Mono / SBS / PV.
4. Adjust Stereo → Adjustments → Depth & CAD quality if depth looks flat or lines too thin.

12.2 Menu layout

12.2.1 Selection and grips in stereo (3.50)

When you select a CAD entity in mono, it stays visible in external SBS with the same highlight colour and grips, at the correct stereo disparity, so you can edit in stereo. Customize selection (default magenta) and grip (default blue) colours in Inspector → CAD selection — mono and stereo share the same palette.

12.3 Display layouts

Monitors are labelled Display 1, Display 2, Display 3 in the UI — the same numbers Windows shows when you click Identify in Display settings.

PluraView triple monitor setup

With three monitors in Win+P Extend, choose display layout PluraView (triple monitor) (Stereo → Display layout, or Display setup wizard). Windows primary (Display 1) carries the UI and mono preview; each PluraView stereo panel gets one eye at full resolution.

1. Default — dual-window per eye: StereoCloud3D opens a borderless GL window on the left-eye monitor (e.g. Display 2) and another on the right-eye monitor (e.g. Display 3). No NVIDIA 3D Stereo driver setup required. Recommended first on RTX Quadro + PluraView.
2. Optional — quad-buffer passive: enable Stereo → Quad-buffer passive (NVIDIA clone). One stereo GL window uses OpenGL quad-buffer (BACK_LEFT / BACK_RIGHT). Requires NVIDIA Control Panel → 3D Stereo → On and passive stereo clone on the two PluraView outputs. The menu shows whether quad-buffer GL is available on the external window.
3. Assign eye monitors — use Display setup or Assign eye monitors… under the PluraView submenu when three displays are connected.

PluraView on two cloned monitors

On some benches the two PluraView panels are wired in NVIDIA Clone Mode, so Windows sees a single monitor rather than two. StereoCloud3D used to refuse that bench outright: the monitor count did not match what a PluraView was supposed to look like.

Turn on View → Stereo → PluraView options → Allow PluraView on two monitors (NVIDIA clone). It is off by default, because on an ordinary two-monitor desk it is not what you want. With it on, the application switches to passive quad-buffer and leaves the mirroring of the reflected eye to the driver.

The driver side has to be set once, in the NVIDIA Control Panel:

1. 3D Settings → Stereo — Display mode → Planar stereo mirror display. Needs an Ampere GPU or newer.
2. Set up stereoscopic 3D → enabled.

Mirroring the reflected eye in software

On a PluraView the eye seen through the mirror arrives reversed, and normally the monitor or the driver flips it. That leaves the bench configured for stereo even when you lift the mirror and want an ordinary 2D desktop.

View → Stereo → PluraView options → Mirror reflected eye (software) moves that flip into the application: the monitor stays neutral, and lifting the mirror gives you back a normal desktop with nothing to reconfigure.

12.4 Adjustments & cursor

• Swap left / right (pseudoscopy) — Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R or menu item under Adjustments.
• Stereo depth — Adjustments → Depth & CAD quality: normalized 0–1 slider 0 = flat, 1 = the maximum recommended relief. The whole travel is usable, so fine adjustments are easy. The value is applied when the slider is released (each change re-renders both eyes).

Stereo cursor & coordinatograph

In stereo the pointer is drawn as a dedicated reticle (ring or filled disc) that is perfectly stable and responds immediately to motion and elevation changes. It is pre-squeezed anamorphically, so through the stereo display it reads as a perfect circle, fused at the cursor's elevation. Default: filled red disc, 3 px. Size (0–10 px), thickness, shape (ring vs disc) and color are configured in Settings → Cursor → Stereo reticle. The standard CAD cursor (cross + pickbox) remains on the 2D editing view.

A coordinatograph (X, Y, Z readout) can be shown on the stereo output, per eye and anamorphic-corrected. The Z value is drawn at twice the X/Y size to ease setting the elevation. Enable it and set size/color in Settings → Cursor → Stereo coordinates. The readout uses the same floating-mark 3D point as the mono status bar and stereo reticle (3.20). During idle AUTO-Z, the readout is frozen on the sampled cloud point until the mouse really moves, avoiding planimetric jitter on stereoscopic panels.

12.5 Dual monitor (UI + external 3D panel)

Stereo SBS is routed to the secondary monitor; the primary display (Display 1) carries menus and a mono viewport. The recommended field setup is a laptop or FlexView (primary) plus a dedicated 3D panel (secondary). With layout Stereo SBS, StereoCloud3D enables the external window automatically when two displays are connected (Win+P Extend).

Windows display setup (required once)

Configure Windows before enabling dual-monitor mode in StereoCloud3D. The steps below apply to Windows 10 and Windows 11.

1. Extend the desktop — press Win+P (or Win+K on some laptops) and choose Extend / Estendi. Never Duplicate / Duplica: mirroring sends the same image to both screens and breaks the dual-window workflow.
2. Open display settings — Settings → System → Display (or right-click the desktop → Display settings).
3. Identify the monitors — click Identify. Windows shows a large number on each physical screen. Note which number is the laptop/FlexView and which is the 3D panel.
4. Arrange the monitor icons — drag the rectangles so their relative positions match the real desk layout (where you look left/right/up/down). Typical VoxelSpace setup: 3D panel on the left, laptop on the right. If your desk is different, match the icons to reality; you can pick the stereo monitor manually in StereoCloud3D (see below).
5. Set the main display — click the laptop / FlexView icon and enable Make this my main display / Rendi principale. The taskbar and StereoCloud3D UI should stay on this screen. If Windows primary is the 3D panel, the app still runs but logs a hint to swap primary back to the laptop.
6. Resolution — select each monitor and set its native resolution (or the project standard, e.g. 1280×720). Different resolutions per monitor are supported; the 3D view is scaled to the external panel automatically.
7. Scale (DPI) — under Scale & layout, prefer 100 % on the 3D panel when possible. High scaling (125 %, 150 %) on one monitor only can shift window edges slightly; if the stereo window does not fill the panel, check this setting.
8. 3D panel hardware mode — on PluraView / VoxelSpace, turn 3D ON on the monitor (hardware side-by-side). StereoCloud3D sends a side-by-side frame; the panel must be in 3D mode for depth to fuse correctly.

StereoCloud3D menu

• Stereo view mode ON.
• Display layout = Stereo SBS (dual monitor) for VoxelSpace / dual-panel setups, or PluraView (triple monitor) when three displays are connected.
• Dual monitor → 3D output monitor — which physical display gets the 3D-only window:
  • Auto (leftmost) — default for VoxelSpace-left / laptop-right layouts.
  • Auto (rightmost) — use when the 3D panel is the rightmost screen.
  • 0: … / 1: … — pick a specific monitor by name if auto-detection does not match your desk (listed in the same submenu).

Verify in the Command Line log

When dual-monitor mode starts, the Command Line panel prints a short Windows checklist and a line per monitor, for example:

Monitor 0: VoxelSpace @ (0,0) 1280x720 [stereo] (Win primary)
Monitor 1: FlexView @ (1280,0) 1920x1080 [UI]

Check that one monitor is tagged [UI] (your editing screen) and one [stereo] (the 3D panel). Tags may combine if misconfigured. Use Stereo → Dual monitor → 3D output monitor to correct the assignment without changing Windows layout.

For PluraView workstations, use Stereo → Verify PluraView setup... to audit the saved monitor IDs and the current external eye-window placement before a digitizing session.

Troubleshooting

12.6 Oblique views on oriented surfaces

Oblique views are the workflow for digitizing CAD features on surfaces that are not horizontal plan views: vertical façades, bridge abutments and pier faces, dam fronts, embankment slopes, roof pitches, retaining walls, and any other plane that cuts through a detailed 3D point cloud. Instead of forcing everything into a top-down WCS view — where steep geometry collapses into a thin line and depth is hard to judge — you tilt the view onto the real surface with pivot orbit and trackball rotation, then draw in true stereoscopic 3D with the same precision you already use on cartographic terrain.

Two view modes

Entities are always stored in World Coordinates (WCS) in the project file. An oblique view only changes how you look and digitize: the cloud and the CAD scene are tilted together to your work plane, and every click is converted back to WCS automatically.

Orienting the view

Load a cloud first, then orient the view from the cloud surface:

• Start a right-button drag over the structure: the pivot lands on it.
• Use Shift+MMB drag for yaw/pitch, or MMB + trackball ball for responsive hands-on rotation without dragging the mouse.
• The cloud and CAD scene rotate together during the gesture, so what you see is always what you will digitize.

Return to the ordinary plan at any time with View → Top / WCS or T: this restores the top-down WCS view and fits the extents.

12.7 UCS from cloud plane (RANSAC)

For façades and other large planar surfaces, you can fit the wall plane directly from the point cloud and lock an oblique UCS in one step — faster and more accurate than manual orientation tuning alone.

• Open View → UCS from cloud plane… or press Ctrl+Shift+U (with a cloud loaded).
• Pick a point on the face, set R (capture radius in metres) for the local RANSAC sample, then Apply. R affects only the plane fit, not what you see after clipping.
• The view aligns to the fitted plane: X horizontal on the wall, Z toward the camera.
• Clip (metres) controls a thin slab along the plane normal: only points on the visible wall within that thickness remain. The lateral extent follows the viewport (everything on screen on that face), not the RANSAC radius.
• Reset clip shows the full cloud again while keeping the oblique UCS.

Working on the oriented plane

Once the view is tilted onto the surface:

• The camera looks along the surface normal, so the wall/roof fills the viewport instead of collapsing into a line.
• The stereo cursor fuses at the elevation you set; parallax zero is at the cursor depth so entities sit on the surface you see.
• Mouse wheel (without modifiers) zooms the view. With Shift or Ctrl held, the wheel moves the cursor in depth — along the line of sight — which is the primary way to “lift” the cursor onto a façade or roof before placing a vertex.
• Cloud snap (Z) searches through the point under the cursor, so the picked elevation matches the cloud surface on that oriented plane.
• The coordinatograph shows the live WCS (X Y Z) coordinate of the cursor for export or reporting.
• A orientation triad (WCS axes) in the corner of the stereo viewport helps you stay oriented on oblique views.

Recommended workflow (façade / structure example)

1. Import the TLS or aerial cloud and open the project in Stereo (SBS on a 3D panel or PluraView triple for full-resolution eyes).
2. Pan/zoom to the structure; drag the horizontal slider to face the façade and the vertical slider to tilt the view onto the wall (or use the trackball).
3. Snap the cursor onto the cloud (Z), fine-tune depth with the wheel + Shift/Ctrl, then start a polyline or line macro and digitize the feature in stereo along the surface.
4. Press T (Top / WCS) to return to plan for spot heights or map-wide editing; your 3D vectors remain in WCS.

Typical applications

12.7 Fusion comfort on deep views

Stereo depth is produced by shifting the two eye images horizontally in proportion to depth. On an aerial nadir view the depth range is only the terrain relief, so that shift stays tiny and the whole model sits comfortably at screen depth. On a view with a large depth range — a road centreline seen from near ground level, a valley looking along its axis, a façade viewed edge-on — the far part of the scene can demand a shift larger than the distance between your eyes. At that point the image pair cannot be fused at all: a straight feature running away from the viewer appears as two lines opening into a V.

StereoCloud3D measures the depth actually visible in the current view and, when needed, reduces the stereo depth just enough to keep the whole picture fusable. The limit is computed from the physical geometry of your monitor — panel size and viewing distance are read from the display itself — against the accepted comfort limit of one degree of disparity at the eye.

There is nothing to configure. The limit engages by itself on deep views and lifts by itself when you zoom or pan back to a shallower one. When it is engaged, View → Stereo → Depth & CAD quality shows Limited to N% for fusion comfort under the depth slider, so a slider that appears not to respond is explained rather than mysterious. The Command Line log records each transition.

The zero-parallax plane — the depth that appears exactly at screen level — is placed on the cloud surface at the centre of the view, so what you are looking at sits at screen depth and the rest of the scene spreads in front of and behind it. Moving the mouse never changes it: only panning, zooming or orbiting does.

12.8 Navigation view (looking only)

Measuring and navigating want opposite things from the same scene, and one setting cannot serve both. To read a few centimetres of relief on flat ground you need a large stereo depth; on a view that runs to the horizon that same setting pushes the far field hundreds of pixels apart and the pair stops fusing. Reduce it until the horizon is comfortable and a two metre tree in the foreground is worth a fraction of a pixel — no relief at all. The conflict is in the depth law itself, not in its tuning.

The Navigation view replaces that law with the one your eyes use. Depth comes from a perspective pair whose separation is derived from your monitor's geometry, so the far field stops at the comfort limit however deep the view is, while the near field keeps real relief. It is meant for flying over the ground and inspecting the model — not for measuring.

Turning Navigation view on with a saved camera path places the camera on the first frame of that path at once (paused). Play starts from there. Turning the view off restores the measuring camera.

Pan, zoom and orbit work exactly as before; zooming becomes a dolly, so the view moves toward what you are looking at instead of magnifying it. Zero parallax sits at the near edge of what is visible, which puts the whole scene at or behind the screen — nothing floats in front of the frame, the most tiring part of a grazing stereo view.

The mode is per session: StereoCloud3D always starts in the measuring view, so a restart is a guaranteed way back regardless of what happened before.

While the mode is on, an orange badge in the top right corner reads NAVIGATION — VIEWING ONLY, NO RESTITUTION. The view behaves like the measuring one under the hand, so the badge is what tells you why a drawing command is being refused.

12.9 Choosing your stereo desk layout

The Stereo menu lists every desk layout StereoCloud3D supports:

Layouts this computer cannot run right now are greyed out rather than hidden, and hovering one states what is missing — a second or third monitor, an emitter that is not connected. Plugging in what it asks for is enough; nothing has to be reinstalled.

12.10 NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 shutter glasses

If you own NVIDIA 3D Vision 2 glasses and their infrared emitter, StereoCloud3D can use them: each eye receives its own image at full resolution while the glasses close one lens at a time in step with the display.

Two paths, chosen automatically

How the two images reach the glasses depends on the graphics card, and StereoCloud3D decides by itself which of the two routes to take.

On a workstation card — a Quadro or professional RTX, with Stereoscopic 3D switched on in the NVIDIA control panel — the driver still produces both eyes, and StereoCloud3D simply hands them to it. This is the same route StereoCAD takes on the same computer. Nothing has to be prepared: no Zadig, no firmware file, no administrator run. In particular the refresh rate of the stereo display does not matter here, because the driver is what decides how the two images reach the panel: a passive polarized screen, a pair of screens in clone mode or a frame-packed 3D mode all show both eyes without alternating frames, and work correctly at 60 Hz and below.

On a consumer card NVIDIA's stereo has been gone since 2019 — driver 425.31 was the last one to carry it — so StereoCloud3D does the work itself: it loads the emitter's firmware, drives it over USB and alternates the eyes from a thread of its own. Nothing from NVIDIA's stereo software is needed or used. In exchange, the emitter has to be prepared once on each computer, and that path is what the rest of this section describes.

What you need, when StereoCloud3D drives the emitter

• Two displays. The interface stays on the Windows primary; the stereo output takes the other one over completely. This one applies to both paths.
• The stereo display at 120 Hz (100 Hz minimum). At 60 Hz each eye would receive 30 images per second and the flicker would be unbearable, so this path refuses to start. It is not asked of a workstation card, where the driver produces both eyes.
• The 3D Vision 2 emitter connected by USB, and the glasses charged.

Start here: Stereo → Active shutter: what is missing

Before following any of the steps below by hand, open Stereo → Active shutter: what is missing. It measures this computer and lists, one line each, everything the glasses need: the two displays, which graphics card is drawing the window, the stereo panel and its refresh rate, which of the two paths the desk is on, and the state of the emitter. Green lines are done; the others say what to do.

Where the application can do the work itself there is a button rather than an instruction — setting the stereo panel to 120 Hz, opening the Windows display settings, restarting with administrator rights. Two things it cannot do for you, because they need your consent: installing the WinUSB driver for the emitter, and supplying an NVIDIA driver file when none is on the machine. For those it tells you exactly what is missing instead of leaving it to be guessed.

Preparing the emitter, once per computer

Windows has no driver for the emitter any more, so you install a generic USB driver for it. This is done once; it survives restarts.

1. Connect the emitter to a USB 2.0 port on the back of the computer — not a hub, not a front panel.
2. Download Zadig from zadig.akeo.ie and run it.
3. Choose Options → List All Devices, then select NVIDIA stereo controller in the list.
4. Set the driver on the right to WinUSB and press Replace Driver.

The emitter’s firmware

The emitter holds no program of its own: one has to be loaded into it every time the computer is switched on. That firmware belongs to NVIDIA and cannot be distributed with StereoCloud3D, so the application takes it from an NVIDIA driver already on your machine — the installed driver, the Windows driver store, or a file you place beside the application — and keeps a copy in %APPDATA%\StereoCloud3D so it only has to do this once.

On most machines this happens silently and there is nothing to do. If no such driver is found, StereoCloud3D says so and names the folder to use. Download an NVIDIA driver package old enough to still contain 3D Vision — 425.31 is the last one — and copy nvstusb.sys (or nvstusb64.sys) out of it into %APPDATA%\StereoCloud3D. You do not have to install that driver: the file alone is enough.

First run

The emitter keeps its firmware in volatile memory, so it is loaded again every time the computer is switched on. Completing that load requires Windows to re-read the device, which needs administrator rights. Start StereoCloud3D as Administrator (right-click its icon → Run as administrator) the first time after switching the computer on or after unplugging the emitter.

Then choose Stereo → NVIDIA 3D Vision 2, or press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V. The stereo display goes full-screen and the glasses start shuttering. If they stay dark, StereoCloud3D shows a panel naming the step that is missing and what to do about it.

Adjusting the shutter

The moment the glasses switch relative to the image is calibrated for a 120 Hz panel and normally needs no attention. On a display that shows ghosting — a faint copy of one eye's image visible to the other — the delay can be changed with shutterIrDelayUs in the settings file, in microseconds. Close StereoCloud3D before editing it.

12.11 Vertical exaggeration

On gentle terrain the relief can be too shallow to read in stereo: a slope of a few metres over a kilometre gives almost no depth to fuse. Vertical exaggeration stretches the elevations on screen so the shape becomes legible, without touching the data.

You reach it from Stereo → Z exaggeration (view), from the Scene Tree context menu on the cloud, or with Ctrl+Shift+X, which cycles 1x, 2x and 3x. The menu also offers 1.5x and 5x and a slider up to 8x. Off is 1.0x.

When it is available. Vertical exaggeration is offered on an aerial project opened in stereo: elsewhere a stretched cloud would misrepresent the geometry you draw against, so the command stays inert. When it is unavailable it names the condition holding it back, so you do not have to guess which one applies.

It is also suspended while the Point section panel is open, because it reads depth from the picture and would report a wrong elevation while the stretch is on. Ask for the exaggeration with it open and the program offers to close it: confirm and the panel closes and the stretch is applied, cancel and nothing changes. Closing Point section loses nothing — every correction is handed to the drawing as you make it.

The stretch is display only. Measurements, coordinates, the elevation readout and the saved drawing are unaffected: what changes is how the cloud and the draped CAD are painted, so a 2x view is a picture of the terrain, not a new version of it. The setting is remembered between sessions, so if a view looks unexpectedly steep, check here first.

13. CAD digitizing

The Draw and Modify menus (and the CAD Draw / CAD Modify toolbars) provide a familiar CAD command set. Combine them with object snaps and the cursor-Z controls to place geometry accurately on the cloud surface.

13.1 Drawing tools

13.2 Modifying entities

The Modify menu provides Move, Copy, Rotate, Scale, Mirror, Offset, Trim, Extend, Fillet, Stretch, Join (merge contiguous lines/arcs into one polyline), Square, Explode and Erase, plus Undo (Ctrl+Z), Redo (Ctrl+Y) and Cancel current (Esc).

Squaring an outline

Square (Modify → Square, the Sqr button on the Edit toolbar, the command SQ, or the right-click menu) makes drawn outlines orthogonal. Like every modify command it works on what you have already selected: select the closed polylines first, then run it. Several at once is fine. With nothing selected it refuses and says so — it never waits for a further click.

The reference side is the longest one, and the command picks it for you. That side keeps its direction; every other side that is already nearly square to it is brought to exactly 90°. The longest side is the best measured one: on a ten-metre wall a ten-centimetre error is half a degree, on a one-metre wall it is five.

A side that is genuinely oblique — a wall that really does run at 60° — is left where it is, together with its neighbours' corners. Squaring straightens what you drew slightly crooked; it does not invent a rectangle where the building is not one. Re-entrant corners (the inside of an L) are squared to 270° exactly like the outside ones.

Three tolerances govern it, in the [Squaring] section of %USERPROFILE%\StereoCloud3D.ini: AngleTolerance (default 10 degrees) is how far from square a corner may be and still be corrected; ShiftTolerance (default 10) is the furthest a vertex may travel — beyond it the correction is refused rather than applied; OffsetTolerance (default 1) covers the case of two parallel sides meeting. Raise the angle tolerance for outlines traced by hand on a sparse cloud.

The polyline is edited in place: it keeps its id, its layer and its selection, and one undo step puts it back.

Undoing an edit the engine never saw

Ctrl+Z is the CAD engine's undo, and it covers the engine's own commands. The corrections the application makes itself do not go through one: dragging a pitch handle, snapping a vertex or an edge with Fix vertex, deleting a building's pitches. For the engine those edits never happened, so Ctrl+Z after a handle drag would not undo the drag — it would undo the previous CAD command, which is a different kind of damage, not a remedy.

Modify → Undo geometry edit (Ctrl+Shift+Z) is the stack that was missing, and the menu entry names the gesture it is about to undo. Two stacks rather than one are deliberate: merging them would mean guessing which of the two histories you meant, exactly while you are repairing a mistake.

13.3 Entity properties

Open the Entity Properties panel from CAD → Entity Properties…, the Ctrl+1 shortcut, the PROPS command, or by right-clicking an entity. The panel follows your selection and lets you inspect and edit attributes such as layer and color. For supported geometry it also lists the entity vertices (with vertex numbers) so you can verify and edit XYZ without leaving the panel.

In inspection mode (no draw command active), select a line or polyline to show grips: green for the start vertex, blue for the others. Drag a grip to move that vertex in X/Y/Z like StereoCAD.

Vertices dialog (3.89)

A left-click is a plain CAD selection and nothing else. The vertex list is opened on purpose, from the right-click menu → Vertices… on the selected entity. The dialog is named Vertices; while it is open the corners are numbered on the mono view, and each row carries the full X, Y and Z of that vertex: type a coordinate and press Enter to move the corner there. Tab / Shift+Tab walk the vertices, < and > do the same, and typing digits with the dialog open sets the elevation of the highlighted vertex. Close it with the window’s close box.

Add and Remove live where they act: right-click on an existing vertex of the selected polyline and the small Add / Remove bubble opens on that corner. Add inserts a new vertex halfway to the next one (already on the outline, ready to be dragged); Remove deletes the one clicked. Clicking elsewhere or pressing Esc puts the bubble away. A right-click that does not land on a vertex opens the ordinary context menu.

Dragging a vertex obeys the same rules as drawing it. While the corner follows the pointer the object snap stays live: the marker is drawn under the cursor and a found endpoint, midpoint or intersection wins over the cursor quota, so a corner can be welded onto existing geometry. AUTO-Z (Ctrl+Shift+Z) and Cloud Z measure the elevation when the pointer stops, and the vertex takes that quota instead of keeping the one it started from. A wheel Z step still wins over both until the pointer moves again.

For a visual check, enable View → Entity vertices or press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+.. StereoCloud3D draws cyan, read-only markers on CAD line, polyline and point vertices; the overlay is for cartographic inspection and does not write to the DWG.

13.4 Layers

• Layer Manager (CAD → Layer Manager…, command LA) — create layers, set color and visibility, and lock a layer to protect its entities from selection/editing. Click a layer’s color swatch to open the RGB color picker for a custom color (the ACI index is updated automatically; you can still type an ACI number directly). Select all / Deselect all switch the On column for every layer the Show filter is listing, so you can blank the drawing and bring back one layer at a time (with Used layers selected the empty layers are left untouched).
• Current layer (3.71) — new entities always go on the current layer. The hidden SC3D_CLOUD_BOUNDS layer (cloud limits used only for framing) is never made current. If layer 0 is missing, StereoCloud3D creates it white (ACI 7) with default settings and makes it current. The Layer combo and Make Current refuse the bounds layer.
• Layer Order (command LAO) — control the draw order of layers so important features render on top.

The Description column and the code library

The Layer Manager carries a Description column beside the name. It is not a field of the layer — the CAD engine has no such field — it is what the layer means, read from the code library.

The library exists because in survey practice the code is the primary thing and the layer follows from it: you pick a code and the layer, the colour and (in time) the symbol come with it. StereoCloud3D ships the Italian national catalogue as its base: the Catalogo dei Dati Territoriali of DM 10 November 2011 (Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 48, 27 February 2012) — 11 layers (Strati), 36 themes (Temi) and 112 classes, each with its mnemonic (EDIFC, AC_VEI) and its hierarchical numeric code (020102). Hovering a description shows both.

That catalogue was not chosen for its size. It is the one the Italian Regions derive their own codings from, which is why a code from Lazio and one from Sardinia — different strings — can be traced to the same class. Codes differ between authorities; the criterion underneath them does not have to.

The library is built in two levels:

• base — the standard, read-only, shipped with the application;
• client — your own package, which references the base codes by mnemonic and adds the layer names you actually use. It does not redefine the standard, so the standard stays one.

A client package ships with the application too, mapping the layers StereoCloud3D's own tools create — the pitch, eave, building-footprint and road layers — onto catalogue classes. The wall layer is left unmapped: the catalogue has no class for a wall surface, and the nearest one is a volume. It lists every language those layers can be named in, because generated layer names follow the interface language.

A layer that is in no package has no description, and that is deliberate. An empty cell tells the truth; a description guessed from a similar name does not. Generic geometry layers (polyline, spline, ellipse, rectangle) are left unmapped for the same reason: they carry no survey meaning.

Codes the standard does not have. A client package can also define its own codes, not only point at catalogue ones — the manhole type a particular contract insists on, a working reference your office uses. A defined code carries its own names and its own layer, and it can declare where it belongs: give it a Strato and a Tema and it appears in that tab, among the catalogue codes the operator would look through anyway. Leave that out and it lands in a Your codes tab of its own, rather than in a place we picked for it by resemblance.

You can see which is which. Codes from the standardised catalogue are drawn in gold; your own stay in the ordinary white of everything else. The direction is deliberate: what is worth marking is the outside provenance, not your own codes, which are the ones you use most.

Studio packages live in %APPDATA%\StereoCloud3D\codes\ — any .json there is loaded, in name order. That folder, not the program folder, is where they belong: an application update rewrites the program folder, and a library built over two years must not go with it. esempio_studio.json, shipped beside the application, is a template to copy there and edit.

Creating a layer from a code. Because the code decides the layer, the Layer Manager has a From code… button beside New layer. It opens the catalogue with one tab per Strato and a heading per Tema — the structure comes from the catalogue itself, so adding a package changes what the dialog shows without changing the dialog. Type in the search box and the tabs step aside for a flat list: someone looking for a manhole does not know which Strato to open, and that is exactly when search earns its place. Picking a code creates its layer if the drawing has none, and makes it current, so what you draw next lands there.

Typing a layer name by hand stays where it was, for the layers a catalogue does not cover.

The library is customer data, not project data: it travels from job to job and grows as you add codes, and a project refers to it rather than owning it.

13.5 Entity groups

Group any set of entities — regardless of their layers — so you can hide or lock them together. Select entities, then Group selection (Ctrl+G). Manage groups in the Entity Groups panel (Ctrl+Shift+G), where each group has Hide and Lock toggles, a Select action, and a delete button. Use Ungroup selection to dissolve a group.

13.6 Eave outline

Draw → Eave outline starts a closed polygon digitized directly on the mono view, one vertex per click, drawn already closed — the same criterion as the elastic polygon in Building reconstruction: from the second vertex on you see the region you are enclosing, not a path you have to imagine. Unlike an ordinary CAD polyline, the vertices are held by the application itself and are not written to the drawing until the outline is closed. This is what lets Multiview correct any of them — including the one you just placed — without the limitation that normally stops a vertex being moved while the drawing command that placed it is still open. This is a standalone tool for an eave outline that stands on its own, independent of any pitch; when a building is drawn from its pitches (13.7 onward) the eave outline is derived automatically and there is no button for it in Multiview.

• The elevation you see is the elevation you get — a vertex takes the elevation shown in the status bar and in the loupe, provided that reading belongs to the pixel under the cursor (within 3 px); otherwise a fresh sample is taken and the log says which of the two answered. There is no longer a second, independent sample at click time, and therefore nothing left to reconcile afterwards: if the number is wrong you see it before clicking, rather than having it quietly adjusted after.
• Elevation lock (Shift) — hold Shift while placing a vertex to skip the cloud sample entirely and use the previous vertex's elevation instead, at whatever plan position the cursor is over. Use it for a vertex hidden under a tree or other clutter, where the cloud gives no reliable surface at all — hysteresis only rescues a vertex the cloud sampled wrong, this bypasses the sample outright. A gold padlock appears next to the cursor whenever Shift is held and a previous vertex exists, showing the elevation it would lock to before you click.
• Layer — the outline is written to a layer assigned to the eave entity (default GRONDA), not to whichever layer happens to be current when you close it. Edit the field in Multiview; the setting is persistent, and the same layer is what a confirmed building's automatic eave outline (13.9) uses too.
• Closing — right-click, or click near the first vertex, closes the outline, writes it to the drawing on the assigned layer, and immediately starts a new one of the same type: no need to reopen the command between buildings.
• Cancel — re-selecting Draw → Eave outline, or Esc, while drawing discards the vertices placed so far without writing anything.

13.7 Pitch face

Draw → Pitch face (or the button inside Multiview) digitizes one roof pitch as a closed face (usually 3 or 4 vertices, but with no fixed cap — an L-shaped pitch or a broken gable needs more), exactly the same way as an eave outline — the elastic polygon lives in the application until it is closed, so Multiview can correct a vertex, including the one you just placed, while the command is still open. The only difference from the eave outline is the layer it is delivered to.

• Snap to an existing vertex — a pitch vertex prefers a nearby vertex already on the pitch or eave outline layer — including an earlier pitch's corner — so two adjacent pitches share the exact same corner instead of leaving a crack between them. A large green square with a solid dot marks the point a click would take, visible as soon as the cursor gets close, before you click. The snapped vertex carries the existing corner's exact elevation.
• Snap to the nearest point on an edge — when no vertex is near enough, the click snaps to the closest point on an existing edge, with the elevation interpolated along that edge. This is what lets a new pitch meet an existing one part-way along a ridge. A vertex is always preferred over an edge at equal distance, because it is the more precise target. A vertex landing in the middle of another pitch's edge makes a T-junction, which the building grouping welds for you — see 13.8.
• Free vertices onto the pitch plane — a pitch is a plane: the first three vertices define it, and from the fourth on the elevation is no longer new information but a consequence. With this checkbox on (default, in Multiview), a vertex you have not fixed yourself takes its elevation from that plane instead of from the cloud sample under the cursor. The plane starts from your own three vertices — it is what you declared, and it is not up for discussion — then only the cloud points within 50 cm of it are kept and the plane is re-fitted by least squares on those, thousands of points instead of three clicks. If the refined plane has tilted more than 15° from yours it is not a refinement and yours is kept, so the result can never run away. A vertex you fixed by snapping, by holding Shift, or with the wheel is never touched: those are decisions, not measurements.
• Elevation lock (Shift) — same mechanism as the eave outline: hold Shift to lock a new vertex's elevation to the previous one instead of sampling the cloud, for a vertex hidden under a tree. It only applies when the cursor is not already snapped to an existing pitch/eave vertex (above) — a snap already carries its own exact elevation, so Shift has no effect there.
• Layer — a layer of its own (default FALDA), separate from the eave outline's, edited next to the button in Multiview.
• Filled — optional checkbox in Multiview: on close, the face is delivered as a filled solid (a polyface mesh) instead of a plain closed outline, with a dark outline added on top so its shape reads even against a dull fill colour. The triangulation is ear clipping, which holds for any simple polygon including re-entrant ones: a fan cut from the first vertex is only valid on a convex polygon, and on an L-shaped pitch its triangles jumped the notch and the fill spilled past its own outline. The Semi-transparent 3D faces checkbox, in the same panel, dithers every filled face so the cloud and anything behind it stay visible through it.
• Closing — right-click, or click near the first vertex, closes the face early (from the 3rd vertex on), writes it to the drawing, and immediately starts a new one.
• Undo a vertex — Esc removes the last vertex, not the command: it is the gesture you want when a single click went wrong. Esc twice within 0.6 s abandons the whole face. The eave outline behaves the same way.
• Guard against impossible geometry — a face whose own bounding box spans more than 100 km is refused rather than written, naming the offending vertex. A single bad elevation used to be enough to make a drawing unusable.

Pitch handles — moving a corner or a whole edge

Every pitch already in the drawing carries handles, always present, with no command to start — the way grips work in a CAD. A filled light-blue dot sits on each vertex and a hollow ring on the midpoint of each edge. Hovering one enlarges it, turns it gold and turns the pointer into a hand; the grab radius is deliberately wider than the dot, because aiming is never pixel-perfect.

• A vertex handle moves that corner. An edge midpoint handle translates the whole edge rigidly, both ends together, so it keeps its length and its direction.
• Everything welded to that point moves with it. Every vertex within 3 cm of the one you grabbed — on the pitch, eave, foot and wall layers alike — moves by the same amount. Moving one entity on its own would unstick the building, which is exactly the defect the handles exist to remove.
• The movement is in plan. The cursor is intersected with the horizontal plane at the handle's own elevation, so the metres are real metres and not an invented scale. Elevation is not touched: for that there are the wheel and Multiview.
• The fill follows the border, because the CAD engine exposes a filled pitch's mesh as a polyline too, so it is moved by the same write.
• Handles disappear while a pitch or an eave outline is being drawn, so a click stays a new vertex and is never stolen. They are drawn behind windows, never over a dialog.
• On release the status bar reports how far the handle moved and how many entities moved with it.

13.8 Numbering and drafting a building

As soon as a closed pitch is delivered (13.7), the pitches on the pitch layer are grouped by shared edge — two pitches that meet along a whole ridge, hip or valley belong to the same building — and each group found is marked with a small numbered circle drawn directly on the mono view: no button, no menu item, it just happens. Two pitches that only touch at a single point (a hip apex) are not joined yet — only a shared edge counts, for now.

T-junctions are welded first. A vertex placed with the edge snap (13.7) lands in the middle of another pitch's edge: geometrically correct, but the two faces then share no whole edge at all, so they would not be grouped and their shared boundary would never cancel. Before any comparison, every vertex that lies on another pitch's edge (within 3 cm, measured in 3D) is inserted into that edge, so P→Q becomes P→M→Q and the two faces really do share M→Q. This is done on the reading, never on the drawing: a filled pitch is two entities carrying the same vertices, and inserting a vertex into the mesh would shift its face indices and tear the fill. What you drew stays what you drew.

A filled pitch counts once. The mesh and its dark border are both exposed as polylines with identical vertices; counting both made every filled pitch look like a two-pitch building whose outline could not close. The duplicate is dropped, and the log names the two entity ids that were paired. A pitch drawn later, anywhere in the survey, re-groups and can renumber every building (west-to-east, south-to-north order), but never forgets which ones were already confirmed (13.9) — that is tracked by which pitches a building owns, not by its number. A project opened with pitches already on the layer from an earlier session numbers them once Draw → Number buildings is run by hand, since there is no new pitch to trigger it automatically.

Clicking a circle selects that building (a gold ring appears around it) for the Confirm controls below; clicking empty space clears the selection. Circle colour says what state a building is in: cyan is a draft — nothing has been written to the drawing yet — and green is confirmed (13.9). Clicking a confirmed building's circle reopens it as a draft: its eave outline, foot and walls are deleted from the drawing and it goes back to being a live preview, editable again until re-confirmed.

A selected draft building previews its eave outline (gold) and its foot (orange) as outlines on the mono view, recomputed every frame from the current eave overhang setting (13.9) — neither is a CAD entity yet. The outline itself is the union, in plan, of the building's pitches: cancelling the edges shared between adjacent pitches (the same edge, walked in opposite directions by the two pitches that share it, present twice in the raw edge list and removed as a pair) and chaining what is left into one ring. A building whose pitches do not close a single ring — a gap, an unfinished pitch — has no preview, and says so on the mono view, next to its own number: an outline that is refused in the log only looks like a building that simply does not work. The refusal itself is deliberate. Grouping accepts a shared edge walked in either direction, while cancelling demands opposite directions; when fewer edges cancel than the group needs, the two tests are contradicting each other and the "outline" that comes out runs along the pitches one after another and passes through the middle of the building. Better no outline than a wrong one, because a wrong one becomes a foot and walls written into the drawing.

Every group is also filed as a product. Each becomes one entry under Products → Buildings in the project tree, named by its number, owning the pitches that make it up — drafts included, not only confirmed buildings. That is what makes a hand-drawn building countable, datable and switchable: its tick box hides its own pitches, and the tick box on the Buildings folder hides them all — drawn and machine-reconstructed alike, because both live in the same family with their origin recorded inside rather than in a separate branch. A re-grouping replaces these entries the same way it replaces the numbering; entries from the automatic building reconstruction are left untouched.

13.9 Confirming a building: eave outline, foot and walls

The controls sit in Multiview, below Pitch face. Confirm writes three entities together for a building still in draft — the eave outline (the building's own outline, on the eave-outline layer, 13.6), the foot (that outline offset inward by the eave overhang, at the ground elevation under the building, on its own layer, default PIEDE) and the walls (one solid mesh per building: the eave soffit where there is an overhang, plus the wall itself down to the ground, on its own layer, default PARETI) — and marks the building confirmed. To redo a confirmed building, reopen it first by clicking its circle (13.8).

• Eave overhang — the field in the panel, in metres, persistent (default 0.50 m). The foot is the outline offset inward by this amount in plan, and the eave soffit is exactly this wide — it is the same construction for both.
• Ground elevation — sampled under the building's outline centroid the same way as GND-Z (the terrain raster first, the point cloud if there is none), falling back to the lowest outline vertex when neither answers.
• Foot and wall layers — each its own field in the panel; the eave outline uses the layer set in 13.6.
• One building at a time — select a building (click its circle) and Confirm building N writes that one. There is no "confirm all": a button that writes geometry into the drawing for buildings you are not looking at is a button that gets pressed by mistake.
• Wall handles — a selected draft building shows an orange handle on the midpoint of each wall of its foot. Dragging one changes the eave overhang for that wall alone, along the direction that wall actually moves in, so a movement parallel to the wall does nothing. It is how you push one wall up against the neighbouring building without changing the rest. The per-wall values are written when you confirm.

13.10 Road

Draw → Road digitizes a road as a set of parallel lines while you follow only one of them. You click one vertex per click along a single edge you can actually see in the model — the guide — and the other lines are carried along beside it. The right button delivers the road and starts a new one immediately; Esc removes the last vertex.

The companion lines are not copies. Only the guide takes its elevation from where you click. Every other line takes its own elevation from the cloud, sampled under its own position at the moment the road is delivered. That is the point of the tool: the result carries the real cross-slope of the carriageway instead of a flat ribbon offset from one edge. On a cambered road, or where the far edge rises into a kerb, the difference is the whole measurement.

Each line is delivered as an open polyline, all of them on the road layer, colour ByLayer.

The settings live in Multiview, Road tab:

• Number of lines — 1 to 3 (default 2). Two gives the pair of edges; three adds the axis or a second carriageway edge.
• Spacing — distance between adjacent lines in metres (default 6.00), the nominal carriageway width.
• Guide line — which of the lines is the one you are digitizing (default the first). Set it to the middle line to follow the axis and have both edges derived, or to the last to follow the far edge.
• Road layer — where the polylines are written (default STRADA).

Pick the guide that you can see: the edge with a kerb, a white line or a clear change of material. The tool is at its best when the line you follow is the one the model shows most sharply, and the ones you cannot see clearly are left to the cloud.

14. Feature macros (rapid coding)

Feature macros bind a single key to “select a construction layer and start drawing a chosen entity type” — the fastest way to digitize themed features. Manage them in CAD → Macro Commands…: add new macros, rebind keys (press Esc to cancel a rebind), and Restore defaults. Macros are saved between sessions.

The built-in starter macros:

15. Spot Height Plan (piano quotato)

This tool seeds a regular grid of points over an area and reads each point's elevation from the cloud, producing a finished spot-height plan. Open it from Tools → Spot Height Plan…, the toolbar Quote button, Ctrl+Shift+H, or the command SH.

15.1 Define the boundary

Click Draw boundary and pick vertices in the viewport; right-click to close the boundary (at least 3 vertices). Use Undo last or Clear as needed, then Done. You can Redraw at any time.

15.2 Grid & seed

• Link X/Y step — keep the X and Y spacing equal (default), or set Step X and Step Y independently.
• Seed — the grid starts from the boundary centroid by default; use Pick seed to set a custom origin point (and Reset seed to revert).

15.3 Elevation from the cloud

• Z method — Nearest point, Lowest (ground), or IDW average.
• Interpolate holes — where there is no cloud beneath a grid node, estimate its height from neighbours instead of leaving a gap.
• Remove spikes — replace anomalous heights (e.g. a power cable over a road) with an interpolated value; set the spike threshold in metres.

15.4 Symbol & layer

• Marker — Dot, Cross, Circle or Square.
• Auto size — when on, marker size and quote text height are set to 0.1 × step; otherwise set them explicitly.
• Decimals — precision of the elevation label (0–6).
• Use custom block — draw your own block at each point instead of the built-in marker.
• Layer and ACI color — the construction layer (default Spot Heights, color 7).

15.5 Seed, verify in stereo, confirm

1. Seed points — a progress dialog samples the grid from the cloud and can be cancelled.
2. Preview — seeded points are shown temporarily, color-coded: cloud-derived, interpolated, spike-corrected. Click a point to delete or restore it. This is where stereo verification pays off — suspicious points are easy to spot in 3D.
3. Confirm & draw — the verified points are drawn as final geometry on the construction layer. Or Re-seed / Cancel.

All Spot Height settings persist between sessions.

15.7 Polygon Cleanup

Cloud → Polygon Cleanup… (Ctrl+Shift+J) hides cloud points inside a closed boundary drawn in the current view: no plane fit is required, the tool uses the oriented view frustum and a polygon you trace on screen.

1. Open the panel from Cloud or press Ctrl+Shift+J.
2. Draw boundary — left-click vertices on the cloud in the main viewport; the polyline closes when you have at least three points.
3. Preview — points inside the extruded volume are highlighted before anything is hidden.
4. Apply hide — matching points move to the temporary hidden cleanup layer. Clear hidden restores them.

Use this for quick clutter removal in the current oblique or zenith view when a planar wall fit is not needed.

15.7.1 Hiding what is in the way, with Q (4.7)

While you are drawing, a tree or a building standing between you and your subject has to go away in one gesture, not through a panel. Hold Q and drag a rectangle in the main view:

• Left to right — the band is green, and that area is hidden.
• Right to left — the band is red, and it gives back the areas it touches.

It is the same direction convention as CAD selection, so there is nothing new to remember. Rectangles add up: draw several and the hidden region takes the shape you need instead of a convenient box. Release Q and you are back to drawing; press it again and you carry on from where the masks were.

Shift+Q clears them all, without opening anything. The broom button beside the orientation triad turns the whole cleanup off and on, so you can compare what you hid with what is really there and go back.

The outlines of applied masks are drawn only while the Polygon Cleanup panel is open. During work they were in the way and told you nothing you could not see.

The masks belong to the project that defined them. Opening another project and closing it no longer leaves its masks in force over this one — a case where the panel said there was no cleanup while the cloud was full of holes.

15.8 Cloud AOI

Cloud → Cloud AOI… (Ctrl+Shift+A) marks an XY area of interest on the cloud: it is where the algorithms compute — ground DTM, cleanup, and the jobs that run on a region — and it bounds the CAD entity filter when you enable that. Draw the rectangle by pressing on a cloud point and dragging to the opposite corner; the four overlay vertices drape onto the cloud surface. The rectangle stays visible, and the AOI is stored in the project manifest.

The AOI no longer cuts what you see. Until 4.3.1 it also limited streaming, so only the tiles inside the rectangle were loaded — a defence from the days when opening a whole cloud was not affordable. The cloud is now always drawn whole, and the rectangle only says where the work happens. A project saved with an AOI therefore opens showing the entire cloud.

15.9 Elevations & Sections — plans, elevations and sections from the cloud

A point cloud already contains every drawing you are going to deliver; what it lacks is a frame to cut them out of. Tools → Elevations & Sections… (Ctrl+Shift+B) builds that frame: a work box aligned to the object rather than to north, whose faces and cut planes become plans, elevations (prospetti) and sections. Every one of them is rasterised from the points themselves, so an orthophoto exists even where nobody ever took a photograph.

The session is filed in the Scene Tree under the cloud it was built from, and it stays there: you can close the panel and the box, the products and their rasters survive with the project.

15.9.1 The work box

1. Opening the panel never touches the mono viewport on its own — a click there does whatever it already did (orbit, pick, nothing) until you press Draw AOI.
2. Draw the area of interest on the cloud. Left-click marks vertices, right-click or Enter closes it (three vertices minimum), Backspace undoes the last one, Esc clears.
3. The box is then fitted from the cloud points inside the polygon — not from the polygon edges. Principal planes are detected on the points, so a building comes out with its own walls square to the box even when it stands at an angle to the survey grid. The panel reports the result as X' × Y' × Z in metres.
4. Redraw AOI polygon… recomputes it if the fit caught the wrong thing (a neighbouring roof, a hedge) — this one re-arms drawing immediately, no need to press Draw AOI again. The panel says what went wrong — no points in the AOI, or no detectable principal orientation — rather than fitting something arbitrary, and drawing is NOT re-armed automatically after a failed fit: press Draw AOI again when ready.

15.9.2 Products

Products live in folders in the Scene Tree, and each one is a view taken off the box:

15.9.3 Where the image is made

The raster is not made here. Choosing the face, the kind of image and the resolution, and pressing Generate, all live in the Workbox panel, which is the one place a drawing is produced; the tone adjustment lives in the viewer, next to the image it changes; and putting a drawing on a sheet is composition, done from the sheet among the images already made. This window defines the box and its cuts, and stops there.

15.10 CAD Sheets — the final drawing on paper

A CAD Sheet is the delivered sheet: a real paper size, a real scale, the drawings placed on it and your CAD drawn on top. It is a drawing of its own, separate from the project CAD, saved with the project and filed under Products — which is why it has its own export rather than riding on File → Export.

Two jobs, two places, and they are deliberately not the same window: you generate a drawing in the Workbox, where the face, the kind of image and the resolution are decided; you compose it on a sheet, choosing among the ones already made.

15.10.1 CAD sheets navigator

View → CAD sheets docks the navigator in the pane beside the mono view — on the Terrestrial Mapping workspace, the pane an aerial job gives to the Zenith Overview. A facade has no planimetric map worth looking at; it has sheets to compose on, so on that workspace the Overview button is not offered and this one takes its place. The Overview itself is still one menu entry away.

• The list — every sheet in the project. The one that is open is amber; the one you have chosen carries the selection bar. They are two different things.
• + beside the title makes a new sheet. The context menu on a row offers Open, Close, New CAD sheet… and Delete — a sheet with drawings on it asks first, saying how many.
• The figure — the chosen sheet drawn small: the paper in its true proportions and one rectangle per drawing placed on it, at its real position and size. It is a layout, not a preview of the CAD: to paint the CAD a sheet has to be opened, and the engine holds one drawing at a time.
• Open — opens the chosen sheet for editing. Clicking a row only chooses it: opening spreads the sheet window across the screen, which is the opposite of a glance. A double click opens, as lists do everywhere.

The figure is available for closed sheets too, read from the sidecar beside the .vec. A sheet that has never been saved has nothing to draw yet.

15.10.2 The sheet window

A sheet is born with a default — A0, 1:100, 600 DPI — and opens with its settings closed: you open it to draw on it, not to configure it. Along the top: Save, Close and one command, Add a drawing…. Middle button pans the sheet.

Adding a drawing

Add a drawing… lists the images that exist, one row each, with the drawing's name, the kind of image and its ground sampling:

Y' min    RGB        4.2 mm/px
Y' max    Depth      8.5 mm/px

Choose one and click the sheet to place it. One at a time. The same list is on the right-click menu over the sheet, and it is the same list — not a second road with its own behaviour.

Nothing is regenerated: the size on paper comes from the drawing's ground extent divided by the print scale, never from the raster's pixel count, so a coarse image and a fine one land at the same size — one is simply less dense. When an image is coarser than half of what the scale would print, the row says so in millimetres before you pick it. For a sharper one, regenerate it in the Workbox at that resolution.

Moving, cropping, removing

Right-click a placed drawing for Move (drag the orange centre handle), Crop (drag the blue edge grips — cropping never rescales), Reset crop, Open in image viewer, Adjust and Delete. Esc leaves the mode. Outside those modes the cursor is the normal CAD cursor: draw, dimension and annotate on the sheet exactly as in the model.

Changing the sheet, and what follows

Sheet settings holds paper size, orientation, Scale 1:N and Export DPI. Apply commits them.

15.10.3 Export

Export sheet… writes the sheet as DXF, or DWG where the DWG converter is installed, and files the result under Products with the date it left the application. The Scene Tree marks a product delivered or on a sheet once it has, so you can tell at a glance which drawings have already gone out.

15.10.4 Workbox panel

View → Workbox docks the drawing set of the active work box on the Terrestrial Mapping workspace — the same pane the CAD sheets navigator and the Multiview use: one pane, one occupant at a time. Every occupant has its own button over the mono view, and a panel that is open always keeps its button even where the job does not otherwise offer it, so nothing can be left open with no way to close it.

Always in view: the volumes

• Volumes — every work box in the project, one row each, with its size and, in a second muted line, whether it isolates the cloud and how many zones have been hidden inside it. The current one is highlighted: what you hide, clean or draw belongs to it. No volume is a row like the others and means the whole cloud. + beside the title adds one; the context menu on a row deletes it, asking first when it carries drawings.
• Only the volume — hides everything outside the box. It follows the operator, not the box: switching volume keeps it as you left it.
• Hide clutter volumes… — the Polygon Cleanup tool, right where the volume is. Draw an outline in the view and the points inside it disappear. With a volume current the hidden zone belongs to that volume; with none, it belongs to the cloud.

Four tabs follow: Drawings, Images, Volume, Resolution.

Drawings

The six faces of the box are six buttons, in two rows of three: front, back, left, right, top, bottom. The one you are working on is lit. Pressing one selects that drawing and takes the view to it — the same move as the preset views on the axis triad, so there is no second way to orient the model.

The fit picks the box's principal axis but cannot know which of the two long sides is the facade, so Front on the other side sits next to the buttons: it turns the names through 180° — front becomes back, left becomes right — and the views follow. It belongs to the volume and is saved with it.

Sections and intermediate plans are not faces: they appear in a dropdown under the buttons, and only when they exist. + Section offers the three cuts by what they do — cross, longitudinal, horizontal — and + Plan adds a plan. There is deliberately no add elevation: the four elevations are the faces of the box. To delete one, right-click its row in that dropdown; the elevations do not appear there, so the command never has to refuse.

What the drawing takes

All of it. The slice is the whole volume, and what ends up in front is decided by the rasterizer, which orders the hits by distance from the viewer and keeps the nearest — painting back to front. There is no depth window to set, and no facade to measure first.

What you do not want in the drawing is taken out afterwards, with Hide clutter volumes…: a decision about what to throw away, not a geometric law applied blind. Hidden zones apply to the drawing too — the same rule the renderer uses on screen — so a point hidden in one view cannot reappear in the other.

Which way it looks is read from the camera at the moment you press Generate: you draw the face you have in front of you. Elevations and plans only — a section has no front and no back, and looking at it from the other side does not turn it into a different section.

Working on the selected drawing

• Name — type a real name (A-A, North elevation, Plan +3.20). It is saved when you leave the field, and the Scene Tree leaf follows.
• Kind of image — Depth, a ramp by distance from the plane, which every cloud can do; RGB, the cloud's own colour, which is the photo-plan you trace over; Intensity, the laser return, which reads the material and does not depend on the light of the day you scanned. Each kind is a separate image with its own file: generating one does not replace the others, and switching kind points the drawing at that kind's image when it already exists.
• Close the windows — see below. Off unless you ask.
• Generate — produces the image and opens it. It is the only command of this tab: opening an image is done in Images, and deleting a drawing on its row.

Generate writes the image raw, without the tone adjustment. The file on the bench is the measurement; brightness and contrast are a lens, set in the viewer while looking at the image, and they are baked in when the image leaves — at delivery. Baking them here as well would mean the viewer applied them a second time on top of the first.

Close the windows

A laser does not come back from glass, so every window is a hole in the drawing — a big one: at 4 mm/px a 1.2 m window is 300 pixels across. This is not a defect of the cloud or of the rasterizer; those points do not exist.

Close the windows fills them from their own border. It is off by default and asked for each drawing, because it invents pixels, and three rules bound what it invents:

• the hole must be closed — no pixel of it touching the edge of the drawing. Without that rule, it would fill the sky;
• it must be smaller than 4 m². A carriage entrance or a courtyard seen through an opening is a closed hole too, and those are not glass;
• the value comes from the border of that hole — the first solid pixel left, right, above and below, weighted by distance. The depth is therefore the wall around it, which is honest because the wall is there; the colour is an average of the border, and that part is invented.

The filled pixels stay marked as interpolated: nothing counts them as measurement.

Images

The images that exist on disk, one row each: drawing, kind, pixels and ground sampling, with * marking one already delivered. Click a row to open it; right-click for Open and Delete the image. Deleting asks first — a raster costs minutes — and takes away only the file on the bench: a copy already delivered under exports is in somebody's hands and this command does not take it back.

Volume

What is decided once per box: its size and Edit…, which reopens the Work box window to redraw the AOI, and a line saying where what you hide now ends up.

Resolution

Nothing is generated here. You declare the resolution deliveries will use, and read what would come out of it. It is the only place that resolution is declared.

• By scale — 1:20 to 1:1000, with the export DPI. The line below translates it: one pixel is so many millimetres on the ground.
• By pixel size — a bare ground sample distance instead. A GeoTIFF for a GIS has no print scale, and forcing one on it would invent a dependency that does not exist.
• What will come out — one row per drawing: its size in metres, the pixels it will produce at the chosen resolution, and what it weighs in memory while it is being made, with the total. Anything past the 20,000 px limit is marked in red with what to do about it — a smaller scale, or splitting the drawing.

These settings belong to the volume and are saved with it.

15.10.5 The viewer: adjusting, and delivering

Generate opens the image in the Image Viewer, because that is where the next decision is taken: you look, you adjust, you hand over.

Adjust

Adjust in the toolbar opens a strip above the image — not a separate window, so you watch the result while you move the number. Its name turns amber while an adjustment is active, so you can tell from outside that the image is not raw.

• Brightness and Contrast — drag, or Ctrl+click to type.
• Auto — takes the 2% and 98% of the image's own tones to black and white, counting only the content: the rasterizer's empty background does not vote, or on a facade with a lot of empty around it the background would decide. When the image has too little content, or all of it on one tone, it says so instead of inventing an adjustment.
• Local — contrast tile by tile instead of over the whole image. This is what brings out a facade that is in the sun on one side and in shadow on the other.
• Reset — back to the image as it was made.

The numbers belong to the drawing, not to the viewer: they are saved with the project and come back when you reopen it. The line under the strip says which of the two cases you are in: these values go into the delivery, or screen only.

The adjustment is recomputed from the pixels as loaded, never from the previous result, so taking the contrast to 2 and back to 1 returns exactly the image you started from. On an image larger than 4096 px the viewer works on a reduced copy: at full resolution each move of the slider cost half a second and once produced a stall of nearly seven. Nothing that matters is lost — the screen cannot show 67 million pixels, and the numbers travel to the delivery, which regenerates from the cloud at full resolution.

Deliver

Deliver… sits in the viewer's menu bar, next to the image you are judging. It makes a file: GeoTIFF, PNG or JPEG. It states the resolution declared in Resolution and how many pixels that gives, and it is not where you change it.

The file on the bench is raw, so a delivery carrying an adjustment goes through a regeneration from the cloud with those values baked in — the same road a delivery already takes whenever the resolution does not match the file on disk. Delivered files go to exports/<volume name>.

Putting a drawing on a sheet is not a delivery command: it is composition, and it is done from the sheet, choosing among the images already made.

16. 3D Inspector window

The internal 3D Inspector renderer (Inspector3DView) remains in the codebase for vector/scene previews, but the floating View → 3D Inspector window is not available in the current release. (Ctrl+Shift+I now toggles imagery underlays.) Use the main viewport, trackball orbit, and oblique stereo views for oriented inspection instead.

17. UI magnifier (loupe)

Because some menu text is small, an optional loupe magnifies the area under the pointer while it hovers the user interface. Toggle it with View → UI magnifier or Ctrl+Shift+M, and tune it in the Inspector:

• Zoom factor — 1.5× to 6× (default 2×).
• Lens size — 80 to 600 px (default 220).

18. Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcuts are fully customizable in CAD → Keyboard Shortcuts…, where you can rebind any managed command, check for conflicts, and Reset all to defaults. The panel also lists the typed CAD commands for reference. Default bindings:

In addition, the default feature macros (P, B, C, Shift+G, V, D, W, R, H, S, X, L, A, O, N) fire when no managed command is active. Managed shortcuts always take precedence over macros.

19. Command line

The Command Line panel accepts typed commands and shows operation results. Type HELP (or ?) to list the available verbs. Useful application verbs include:

NEWOPENSAVE SAVEASIMPORTEXPORT FITTOPPM IMAGERY / ECW SNAPXYZ / SNAPXY / SNAPZ SH / QUOTEPROPSGROUP GROUPSLA (Layer)LAO (Layer Order) CLEAR / CLSNAV VOLUMI / VOLUMES / VOL

All standard CAD drawing and editing commands can also be typed (e.g. LINE, PLINE, CIRCLE, MOVE, JOIN, TRIM, REGEN). Type HELP for the complete list with aliases.

19.1 History and diagnostics

The row under the input always shows the latest message addressed to you. The > button to the left of the prompt opens the history below it: the commands you typed and the replies they produced — what was saved, what was measured, why a command refused to start. Nothing else is mixed in.

StereoCloud3D also writes a continuous diagnostic stream — streaming, imagery, view and timing telemetry — at several lines per second. That stream is not the history: it goes to the log file, and the Diagnostics checkbox in the expanded panel shows it in place of the history when support asks for it. Turning it on changes only what this panel displays; the log file always has all of it.

CLEAR (or CLS) empties both.

The log file itself is %APPDATA%\StereoCloud3D\StereoCloud3D.log, with the previous window kept alongside it as StereoCloud3D.log.1.

20. Job report

Open File → Job Report… for a per-project production summary. It records:

• Operator name, project name, created / modified dates.
• Worked time — accumulated while the window is focused (short gaps ignored).
• Points used — total across imported sources.
• Entities generated — current CAD entity count.
• Stereo mode (Mono, or Stereo with its output format).
• Cloud and vector dataset sizes.
• Whether the project is password-protected.

Use Export report… (text file) or Copy to clipboard to share it. You can also set or update the project password from here.

21. Settings & files

Global preferences are stored per user at:

%APPDATA%\StereoCloud3D\settings.json

Floating panel and toolbar window geometry (positions and sizes) is stored separately in:

%APPDATA%\StereoCloud3D\imgui.ini

settings.json includes recent projects, window placement, keyboard bindings, which panels and toolbars were open (uiPanels), wheel/cursor-Z steps, autosave options, UI scale (0.75× to 2.0× for menus, panels and toolbars; each floating toolbar can also set its own scale from the caption scale button, 25%…250%), CAD selection/grip colours, magnifier settings, object-snap state (including optional edge auto-pan while drawing), the Cloud Performance preset, surfel/EDL visual options, Spot Height defaults, feature macros, the custom toolbar, combobox-toolbar visibility flags, and Kensington trackball options (enable, invert, Z speed, button assignments). The license key is not part of settings.json: it lives in license_key.dat in the same folder, encrypted for your Windows account, and is only used to pre-fill the Activation window (see Activation & licensing). Use View → Save workspace layout to write uiPanels and imgui.ini immediately without exiting.

Project-specific data (clouds, drawing, stereo, visualization, security and the job report) is stored inside the project folder's manifest, so projects are portable.

22. Managing your license

22.1 License status

Open Help → License Status… to see your status, license type, expiry and estimated remaining time, the enabled features, this device's fingerprint, the list of activated devices, and the server connection state.

22.2 Modules

StereoCloud3D has three pipelines — Aerial Mapping, Terrestrial Mapping, Mobile Mapping (see 8.6 Project workspaces) — and the License Status panel lists all three with their coverage. There are two regimes, and the heading above the list says which one you are in:

• All included until date — every pipeline is open, for a limited time. This is what every license reads today: full access at purchase and through the trial, running out on the date shown.
• Renewed per module — your license now names which pipelines are covered. Each one reads included or not included in the current license, the same phrase New Project and View → Workspace use when a pipeline you do not have is listed there, disabled.

A pipeline that is not included does not touch any project you already have: it opens exactly as if no workspace were set (see 8.6, Licensing), never blocked, never with data at risk.

The raw entitlement list at the bottom of the section is what your license administrator or support will ask for if something looks wrong.

22.3 Moving to another computer

A license is bound to a fixed number of devices. To free a seat — for example when you replace or reinstall a machine — use Deactivate this device… in the License Status dialog. After you confirm, this computer is removed from the license, the remembered key is forgotten and the application closes; you can then activate the freed seat on the new machine.

22.4 Device fingerprint

Each activation binds your license to a device fingerprint computed from stable hardware identifiers: the Windows install ID (MachineGuid), the system volume serial, and a CPU signature. Renaming the computer or signing in under a different Windows account on the same machine does not change the fingerprint.

Reinstalling Windows, replacing the system drive, or upgrading from an older build that used a different fingerprint formula may register as a new device. If you hit the device limit, use Deactivate this device on a machine you no longer use, or ask your administrator to remove the stale entry from the license. Then activate again on the current PC.

The fingerprint shown in Help → License Status… is useful when contacting support or your license administrator.

22.5 Expiry

A license works through the whole of its expiry day and stops after it. There is no automatic extension: a grace period exists only when your license administrator granted one explicitly, and even then it lets you finish work — it does not allow a new download or an activation on a different computer.

Once a license has expired, its activated devices and open sessions are released. The license record itself is kept, so a renewal restores your seat: after the administrator moves the expiry date, simply activate again with the same key.

22.6 Downloading the installer

The installer download asks for a license key, and serves the file only while that key is valid and active. An expired key — including one inside a granted grace period — cannot download the software; renew it first.

23. Cloud Batch Converter

Tools → Cloud Batch Converter... (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+N) opens a standalone utility installed next to StereoCloud3D (CloudBatchConverter.exe). Use it to convert one or many .las / .laz files into streaming tile indexes without blocking your main workstation session. This is the recommended path when you receive several large surveys and want to prepare tile indexes before opening a project, or when conversion would take long enough to interrupt digitizing.

Why use it

• Productivity — queue several large surveys overnight or while you digitize in StereoCloud3D; conversion runs in its own process.
• Very large files — the same streaming converter as in-project import handles multi-GB LAZ and billion-point LAS; progress is shown per file.
• Flexible output — choose a base output folder; each source becomes <output>/<name>/tile_index.json ready for Project Manager → Clouds → Add tile index....

Converter options

• Output folder — each source file becomes <output>/<name>/tile_index.json.
• Queue — add files with the picker or drag from Explorer; jobs run one at a time.
• Progress — per-file status, log tail on failure (CRS, corrupt LAS, disk space).
• Attach to project — use Project Manager → Clouds → Add tile index... or copy the folder into your project’s cloud/ tree.

Only one Batch Converter window runs at a time. Launching again from the menu forwards new files to the existing window.

Cancel a running job or clear completed entries from the queue list. Failed jobs show the converter log tail so you can diagnose CRS, corrupt LAS, or disk-space issues.

24. Ask StereoCloud3D (AI help)

Help → Ask StereoCloud3D (AI)... (Ctrl+Shift+/) opens the built-in help assistant included with your license.

The green frame. This panel is drawn with a green title bar and a green border, and so is every other panel that sends what you give it to a remote service. The colour is the convention, stated here once instead of repeated in every dialog: a window framed in green does not answer from your workstation alone. Panels without it work only on the data already on your machine.

What it does

• StereoCloud3D workflows — menus, shortcuts, import, stereo setup, licensing, and other topics covered in this User Guide.
• Geomatics & remote sensing — LiDAR, photogrammetry, GNSS/RTK, cartography, UAV mapping, DTM/DSM, accuracy, point clouds, and related concepts (curated reference library).

Powered by OpenAI

When your license is active and the help service has OpenAI enabled, answers are synthesized by OpenAI GPT-4o-mini using excerpts from this User Guide and the geomatics reference. The chat shows a green [OpenAI GPT-4o-mini] label on those answers.

You may ask in any language (German, Italian, French, etc.). Release 3.20 instructs the server to answer in the same language as your question (not only the Windows UI locale). StereoCloud3D menu paths in answers stay in English (e.g. Help → User Guide). Windows UI language is still sent as a hint when available.

Privacy. Only your question text and app version are sent to the help service. Project files, point clouds, CAD geometry, and screen captures are never uploaded.

A daily quota per license session applies (typically 100 questions; shown in the panel when online).

Offline fallback

If the help server is unreachable, the app searches the local copy of this User Guide and a built-in domain glossary. Answers are labelled Offline or Geomatics reference in the chat.

Example questions: What is LiDAR?, How do I import a LAS file?, What is the difference between DTM and DSM?, How do I set up Side-by-Side stereo?

Developer offline mode

Set environment variable SC3D_HELP_AI_LOCAL=1 to force offline-only answers (no server round-trip). The marker file .sc3d_local_dev skips the consent screen but still uses the licensed server when available.

25. Screenshots and support packages

Capture screenshot

Tools → Capture screenshot (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+C) writes a PNG of the whole application window — panels, toolbars and viewport together — into the screenshots folder of the open project. With no project open it goes to Pictures\StereoCloud3D.

The whole window is captured, not just the data view: what tells one workspace from another is how the interface is arranged, so a picture cropped to the point cloud would leave out the very thing it is meant to show.

The picture carries a band along the bottom naming the workspace on the left and the project and version on the right. The band is part of the image on purpose. A general project has a neutral grey band, a specialised workspace has its own colour — so a picture of the general product cannot be passed off as a specialist one, and the other way round.

The capture is always the mono window, also while stereo is running: a side-by-side frame is not usable in a document or on a page, and publication is what this command is for. To send a stereo picture to support, use the package below.

Share with support

Help → Share with support... builds a zip file in the support folder of the project. You choose what goes in:

• Application window — the same banded picture as above.
• Stereo view (both eyes) — left and right eye side by side at full size. Offered only while stereo is drawing both eyes.
• What happened? — an optional comment; write what you were doing and what you expected instead.

The zip also contains the application log and a short info.txt with the version, the workspace and the project.

Nothing is sent. The command builds the file and tells you where it is; attaching it to a message is your decision. The package holds a picture of your data and a log that names projects and paths, so look at it before you send it. It contains no licence key, no password and no device identifier.

26. Troubleshooting

27. Glossary