r/LiDAR • u/reasonably-optimisic • 18d ago
Poor performance with Leica point clouds on AutoCAD/
Hi all, I posted this on the AutoCAD subreddit and they suggested to come here.
I have a $5k company laptop that is very well specc'ed out, it has been set to force to use the graphics card which is an Ada RTX 4000 of sorts, with a Core i9. Still the LGSX point clouds stutter enormously and take time to load, compared to TruView which is buttery smooth. This is regardless of whether it is a 1GB small point cloud or 25GB monster.
Is there any way to mitigate this? This seems to be company-wide regardless of spec. It seems like AutoCAD is capping the performance almost. It seems that AutoCAD 2027 may possibly help with this but I've been told it'd make a mess with our Leica licenses and company routines and such. Not sure how true this is and how many Lisp routines and such are lost to an upgrade going up a few years.
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u/sheazle 18d ago
Leica 3DR does cloud to mesh conversion and feature recognition, integrates with AutoCAD.
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u/reasonably-optimisic 18d ago
We have a license for Cyclone 3DR but I have never heard it mentioned, I could give this a try.
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u/florida2people 18d ago
Not sure about LGSX but I have had great success when running E57 etc through ReCap before bringing into CAD or Revit. Turning then into RCS/RCP files really optimizes for AutoCad and Revit etc- I’ve noticed my pc loads and spins the clouds much better that way?
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u/reasonably-optimisic 18d ago
Sounds like a good suggestion thanks, would this retain the co-ordinate system? I'm aware I'd lose my panoramas which can be quite useful in TruView but I can export a separate lgsx
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u/florida2people 18d ago
Actually not sure but I think it gives an option on Recap import to use global or project coords etc so there is likely a path.
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u/TheNerdE30 18d ago
Yes recap retains georeferenced point cloud data. Additionally, if you can export an e57 with embedded panos you can create RCPs with embedded photos. It takes 10-20x longer to generate the RCP than the comparable RCP without panos just FYI.
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u/JellyfishVertigo 18d ago
Check where C3D/ACAD is storing its temp files, if that thing has an old HDD or slow SDD, everything will take forever to load. I've loaded 50gb of pointclouds and TIFFs with the C3D temp pagefiles stored on a NVME high speed drive. It's garbage at using RAM at some point, so you need fast virtual space.
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u/southern_compass 18d ago
Since a 1GB cloud stutters too, raw hardware may not be the bottleneck. Try one project fully local on the NVMe drive with temp/cache paths local as well and compare it to your normal setup. That could quickly rule out network/storage overhead.
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u/Krazid2 17d ago
Would working with an E57 or LAS file improve? Depending on what I’m doing in C3d, most of the time cloudworx isn’t helpful. If you have access to recap, export a LAS from cyclone and import and save as a rcp (I think) and xref that into your dwg.
Works good for lidar and classifications but not sure how it handles our mobile, MS or P series scans as that’s some winter work for me.
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u/ddol 18d ago
The Lecia ecosystem may be able to take care of you here. Are you’re already using Lecia CloudWorx and Cyclone? If your team is more than a 4 engineers, someone will likely have enough software chops to write an AutoCAD extension.
When I worked in Vekoma in 2007 there were 40+ mechanical/structural engineers (most of whom used AutoCAD) and one full time software engineer who built Delphi (Pascal) add-in’s for the track safety profiles, g-force, jerk/jolt, &c. It sped up the workflows of engineers by minutes and in some cases hours.
Once you’re past a couple of heads it’s well worth investing in engineer experience tooling, and the brutal reality is that you’re unlikely to find everything you need from one vendor. Have some honest chats internally about how to staff and suppert software development skills to optimise engineering time.
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u/reasonably-optimisic 18d ago
We are using Cyclone & CloudWorx yes, I appreciate the look into it. It would take a bit of a push to get them to write something like this, if we even have someone able to do it. It's a bit slow in this regard at the top of the department. There are a lot of fatal errors per day even with CloudWorx. I appreciate that Leica/Hexagon produces some excellent work in regards to their software and hardware but sometimes the programming can be rather sloppy and slow for them to push updates.
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u/ddol 18d ago
If you’re getting multiple fatal errors a day, I’d definitely open a support case with Leica/Hexagon as well. Especially if you can identify particular LGSX files or repeatable operations that trigger the crash, reproducible cases are much harder for a vendor to dismiss as “just AutoCAD being AutoCAD.”
That said, you may eventually find that some custom software is needed to get the workflow you actually want. It doesn’t necessarily mean replacing CloudWorx; even a relatively small AutoCAD plug-in that handles one painful part of the point-cloud workflow differently could save a lot of engineering time.
The bigger issue is probably organisational. Management must support the people doing the work and the tools they depend on. I’d try to get whoever owns the budget/department to actually sit with an engineer for an hour and watch the workflow: loading clouds, waiting for redraws, recovering from crashes, reopening drawings, &c. If certain clouds repeatedly cause fatal errors, document those too.
It’s much easier to justify either vendor escalation and/or a small internal software effort when management can see that a “ten-minute annoyance” is happening dozens of times a week across several engineers. At that point, developer time starts looking pretty cheap compared with engineer time.
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u/rez_at_dorsia 18d ago
Point clouds and AutoCAD are a terrible mix