In this section, we will review bringing a point cloud into Autodesk Civil 3D. Remember that there are two file formats for point clouds within Civil 3D: RCP and RCS. If your files are not already converted into RCP or RCS, convert them in ReCap Pro before bringing them into Civil 3D.
Task: Bring a point cloud into Civil 3D
- Start a new drawing. First, make sure your coordinate system is set correctly.
- Open the “Settings” tab of “Toolspace”.
- Right-click on your drawing and select “Edit Drawing Settings”.
- In the “Units and Zone” tab, select your state and input your coordinate system code. For this project, you can type in CO83-CF in the Selected coordinate system code field.
- Select “OK”.
- Secondly, we want to check our units.
- Key in “UNITS” in your command space.
- When the “Drawing Units” window appears, check your “Insertion scale” and select “US Survey Feet”.
- Select “OK”.
- Select the “Insert” tab at the top of the screen.
- Click “Attach” in the “Point Cloud” panel.
- This will bring up a window titled “Select Point Cloud File”. Search for your file and click “Open”.
- A window titled “Attach Point Cloud” will pop up. Deselect “Specify on-screen” and click “OK”.
- This will bring your point cloud into Civil 3D
- Select the point cloud. From here you can do several things:
- Select “Scan Colors” from the “Visualization” panel to change the visual aspect of the point cloud.
- Crop a certain part of the point cloud to focus on a certain area by selecting “Rectangular” in the “Cropping” panel and selecting a shape and cropping the area to focus on.
Bringing in a point cloud is quite simple, as you can see. We are now ready to start extracting geometry and creating surfaces from this point cloud.
