When looking at drafting using point clouds, scan data can’t natively be printed. As a result an Orthophoto needs to be generated first to use to print the scan data to.
To generate an Orthophoto:
- Turn off the Layers group and all Point Cloud Regions that are unwanted in the final output (eg Default).
- Select Orthophoto from the Point Clouds tab
- In this tool select True Colour in the type.
Other options can be selected if needed however True Colour will be the most common.
- Give the output photo a name (orthophoto is fine).
- For Plane, select the drop down and choose <New …>
- Select New
- Make sure Perpendicular to Elevation is selected.
- Click in the box under position and then pick a point on the point cloud.
This just specifies the height of the plane being used. - Select Close
Back in the Create Orthophoto menu:
- Pick corner one
The location for the top left corner of the Orthophoto. - Pick corner two.
The location for the bottom right corner of the Orthophoto. - Select the pixel size.
This will determine the size of the resulting pixels in the image (how big each scan point will be). 0.01 will be very small and produce a large file, 1 will be very large and produce a small file size.
Ideally this should be somewhere between 0.01 and 0.08, but this may require some testing in some projects to find a sweet spot. It is entirely possible that an orthophoto generated at 0.01 AND at 0.06 may produce good results as well as the 0.06 orthophoto will fill in the spaces more while the 0.01 will show the finer detail.
Click here for more tips on pixel sizing. - Select Store to generate the orthophoto.
The resulting image can be turned on and off in the View Filter Manager and can be used in drafting for the background of printed plans.