Saving bin-file to pts or comparable

[Youngtimer]

Dear all,

first of all, I'm relativly new to the topic and have never worked with 3D scans before, so please forgive me if I'm asking stupid questions...

I've scanned a car with a device and received a .dp file, which I modified with CC and saved as a .bin file. This worked pretty well, but for the further workflow it is needed that I'll save this data as a .pts file. The file is saved, but I'm not able to open it with any other program like Meshlab or similar. I'm not sure what to choose in the saving dialogue though - is this causing the fault, or am I doing something wrong? I've tried to save the whole file/folder, or just the combined frame, but unfortunately nothing changes, I still get an error message when I try to open it.

Thanks in advance for your help!
BR Jan

[daniel]

PTS files are particular ASCII files with 'X Y Z Intensity R G B' on each line. You can save only one cloud per file.

Therefore to properly save a DP file (or any other file with multiple frames) you should do the following;
- select all the frames at once and merge them (with 'Edit > Merge')
- select the merged cloud
- be sure there's no normal (i.e. don't compute them when you load the DP file or remove them from the merged cloud with 'Edit > Normals > Delete')
- save the merge cloud as an 'ASCII' file
- in the ASCII file 'Save' dialog, be sure to check the second 'order' scheme ('point, SF(s), color, normal')

[Youngtimer]

Hi Daniel,

many thanks for your quick help!
I've merged the frames, removed the normals and saved as an ASCII file with the second order scheme, but unfortunately I still get the Error message when I try to open the file... I've just played around a little bit and found out that at least I can save it as a .txt file - this can be opened and doesn't cause an Error right at the beginning. But after the import-dialogue it takes some time, and after that it also shows an different Error dialogue (see attachment). Do you have an idea what could be my failure?

[daniel]

Can you show the first lines of the pts file (let say 10)?

[Youngtimer]

Here we go:

479.61059570 -112.09383392 1957.80957031 7569.000000 192 196 191
483.02499390 -112.96291351 1957.90283203 7647.000000 192 198 192
490.64349365 -131.69049072 1960.78247070 7647.000000 191 199 192
493.75454712 -131.36344910 1960.68884277 7569.000000 189 197 190
496.03997803 -127.46869659 1960.03808594 7569.000000 189 197 190
499.71505737 -129.52395630 1960.31542969 7608.000000 190 198 192
502.84082031 -129.20103455 1960.22180176 7608.000000 189 198 193
505.70285034 -127.69357300 1959.93981934 7569.000000 187 197 194
513.16607666 -146.38879395 1962.80468750 7569.000000 186 197 194
517.36218262 -150.82189941 1963.44287109 7608.000000 187 197 195

[daniel]

Oh, can you also check the 'number of points (separate line)' checkbox in the Save dialog? It may be required by PTS file (I can't remember).

[Youngtimer]

Sorry, that didn't work neither.

[daniel]

Strange.

Last guess: can you remove all '.000000' occurrences? (you can use a text editor such as Notepad++ and 'replace' all '.000000' by nothing).

[Youngtimer]

Unfortunately the file has about 1,2GB and I therefore I get a memory Error message when I try to remove the .000000 occurences (my PC is not the best...)
If you want you can take a look at the file, I've uploaded it to my online-storage (It's the bin-file). It still has normals as I dind't save the changes in this file. If you've got any troubles with the download please let me know, as I'm getting an Error message when I open it (It seems that my PC doesn't like me today...):
https://storage.driveonweb.de/dowdoc/65 ... 5041fe8471

[daniel]

I think something is crooked on Meshlab side because I failed to open even a very simple PTS file (not generated by CC just to be sure).

To open your file in Meshlab... you just need to use the 'txt' extension instead ;).

In this case you'll get the following dialog:

meshlab_ascii_preopen_dialog.jpg (31.36 KiB) Viewed 6947 times

To load a PTS file, use the 'SPACE' separator, and the 'X Y Z Reflectance R G B' configuration (you might spot that they used 3 times the same field names - luckily their respective roles are pretty obvious each time ;).