Point Cloud Tools

Before a scan becomes a mesh it's usually a point cloud — millions or billions of XYZ + RGB + intensity samples. Laser scanners, drone LiDAR, and most photogrammetry pipelines spit out point clouds as the intermediate representation. Pairs with Industrial & Laser Scanners and Drone Mapping & Aerial Photogrammetry (where they come from), Mesh Processing (when you turn them into meshes), Scan-to-CAD / Reverse Engineering (when you fit primitives), and Maps & Geo for GIS / spatial publishing.

OSS desktop apps

• ★ CloudCompare — free, OSS (GPL); the FOSS workhorse for point clouds and meshes. Registration (ICP), segmentation, distance comparison (M3C2), classification, plane / cylinder / sphere fitting, mesh extraction, format-zoo I/O. The default FOSS point-cloud tool.
• ★ MeshLab — free, OSS (GPL); also reads point clouds; Poisson reconstruction; see Mesh Processing.
• CloudViewer — lightweight viewer-only.

OSS libraries

• ★ Open3D — free, OSS (MIT); modern Python + C++ library for point clouds and meshes. Registration, voxel down-sampling, RANSAC, ICP, Poisson reconstruction, machine-learning-friendly. The 2024–2026 default for scripted point-cloud work.
• ★ PDAL (Point Data Abstraction Library) — free, OSS (BSD); GDAL for point clouds. Pipeline / filter / convert; reads everything (LAS / LAZ / E57 / PLY / Ept / COPC / OBJ).
• PCL (Point Cloud Library) — C++ library; the long-standing classic; somewhat dormant but still used.
• laspy / pylas / pdal-python — Python LAS readers.
• OpenPointCloudLibrary / OPL — research-grade; niche.
• liblas / LASTools — older C++ LAS toolchain (LASTools is partly proprietary; las2las etc. are free).

Web / browser viewers

• ★ Potree — free, OSS (FreeBSD); browser point-cloud viewer; streams huge clouds. The default web viewer for TLS / aerial captures.
• PotreeConverter — free; CLI to convert LAS / LAZ / PLY into Potree's tile format.
• 3D Tiles + Cesium — open OGC standard for tiled 3D (point cloud, mesh, splat); see 3D / WebGL.
• Itowns — open-source 3D-Tiles / Potree-compatible viewer.
• deck.gl PointCloudLayer — React-friendly web layer for point clouds.

Paid / pro

• Bentley Pointools — paid; pro point-cloud editor for AEC.
• Bentley iTwin Capture Modeler — paid; large-scale.
• Autodesk ReCap Pro — paid; ingest TLS / aerial.
• Faro SCENE / Leica Cyclone / Trimble RealWorks — vendor-bundled; see Industrial & Laser Scanners.
• Cintoo Cloud — paid SaaS; cloud-hosted TLS scans.
• Esri ArcGIS Pro (with the 3D Analyst extension) — paid; LAS classification / DTM extraction.

Common operations + go-to tools

• Registration (align two scans) — CloudCompare ICP, Open3D ICP, vendor tools.
• Down-sampling / voxel reduction — Open3D voxel_down_sample, CloudCompare subsampling.
• Classification (ground / vegetation / building) — PDAL filters.smrf, LAStools lasground.
• Mesh reconstruction — Open3D Poisson, MeshLab screened Poisson, CloudCompare Poisson.
• Distance / change detection — CloudCompare M3C2 plugin (the gold standard).
• Primitive fitting (planes, cylinders) — CloudCompare RANSAC, Open3D, see Scan-to-CAD / Reverse Engineering.
• Convert to web tiles — PotreeConverter, py3dtiles, Cesium ION pipeline.

Formats

• ★ LAS / LAZ — the standard for surveying / aerial / TLS; LAZ is the lossless compression. ASPRS spec.
• ★ E57 — open ASTM standard; pan-vendor TLS interchange.
• PLY — common from photogrammetry; carries colour.
• PCD — PCL's native; binary or ASCII.
• XYZ / TXT — the lowest-common-denominator dump.
• COPC (Cloud-Optimized Point Cloud) — modern streaming-friendly LAZ; for cloud / web.
• 3D Tiles — OGC standard; tiled point cloud / mesh / splat.
• Vendor formats (Faro .fls, Z+F .zfs, Riegl .rxp) — read by SCENE / vendor tools, exported to E57 for portability.

Pick this if…

• Default FOSS desktop point-cloud app: CloudCompare.
• Default FOSS Python lib for scripts: Open3D (or PDAL for pipeline-style).
• Stream a huge cloud in the browser: Potree, or 3D Tiles via Cesium.
• Convert / re-project / pipeline LAS: PDAL.
• Compare two scans (deformation, change): CloudCompare M3C2.
• Going to a parametric CAD model: see Scan-to-CAD / Reverse Engineering.
• Going to a textured mesh: see Mesh Processing.