Does Neurones 3D run offline?

Yes, completely. Neurones 3D is a desktop application with no account, no cloud, and no telemetry. The paid editions are licensed offline too: a key validated on your machine, with no activation server and no account.

Is there a free version of Neurones 3D?

Yes, forever. The free tier is the whole viewer: every format, photoreal rendering, classification, segmentation, sections and measurement, with no trial clock and no account. The Desktop edition, bought once and yours to keep, unlocks every export: drawings, rasters, reports, PLY, glTF, MP4 flythroughs and high-resolution orthoimages.

Can Neurones 3D handle billions of points?

Yes. The out-of-core LOD index streams from disk, so a 2,000,000,000-point cloud renders at 60 fps on ordinary hardware: the limit is your disk, not your RAM. A 43.5 million point scene renders at about 110 fps at 1600x900 on a mid-range GPU.

Neurones 3D (N3D) · Point cloud and Gaussian splatting software

Neurones 3D Free point cloud software for Windows

Classify, segment and measure point clouds and Gaussian splats, then turn them into floor plans, DXF drawings, terrain models and contours.

The free viewer runs every process; you pay once, only to save the results. Billions of points on a 10-year-old laptop, one 15 MB file, offline, no telemetry.

Download free for Windows Explore every feature

From the lab to everyone

Fifteen years of point cloud research, in one download.

Neurones 3D is built on the Smart Point Cloud, the research Dr. Florent Poux has carried from his Ph.D. at the University of Liège through 60+ peer-reviewed papers. What usually stays in papers and lab code now runs on an ordinary laptop, offline.

Every point knows where it is, what it is, what it relates to, and how the next process can use it.

That is why the engine does not stop at showing a scan: it segments and classifies it, relates its rooms and objects, and writes the plan, the terrain model, the change map and the report.

Dr. Florent PouxPh.D., University of Liège · ISPRS Jack Dangermond Award 2019 · author of 3D Data Science with Python (O'Reilly)The story behind the engine →

One engine, eleven domains.

Everything below ships in the current build. Every number is measured, not projected.

01Point Cloud Engine

Billions of points on ordinary hardware, out of core.

43.5M points parsed in ~1.2 sMemory-mapped, parallel LAS reading. LAZ decompresses at ~40M points/s: a 142M-point file opens in ~3.3 s.
Reopens in ~1 s, zero-copyThe LOD index memory-maps back in. The OS page cache is the working set, no RAM materialization.
Bounded-memory indexingMorton external sort builds the index at a forced 100 MB RAM budget, ~16 s for 43.5M points.
LAS, LAZ, E57, PLY, NPYPlus COPC, 360 panoramas from E57 tripod scans, and multi-layer scenes by Shift+drop.

02Gaussian Splatting

Photoreal splats, native in the engine.

Full EWA rasterizerCovariance projection, Mip-Splatting anti-aliasing, premultiplied sorted blending. PLY (INRIA) and SPZ (Niantic).
Navigation never blocksSplats re-sort asynchronously while you move. Sorting measured 2.6 to 3.9x faster in the current build.
Gaussian surfels at 43.5M scalePoints become soft tangent-plane Gaussians that blend into continuous surfaces, sort-free.

03Rendering Engine

Every way your data can look, one keystroke apart.

Points or continuous surfaceOne toggle between crisp points and screen-space surface reconstruction with hole infill; oriented surfels and photoreal Gaussian surfels (sort-free, 2DGS-style) complete the range.
A real lighting stackEye-Dome Lighting, screen-space ambient occlusion, rim lighting, composited with the grid and a gradient backdrop.
SSAA up to 4xSupersampling with contrast-adaptive sharpening, plus 4 mesh shading modes: shaded, albedo, normals, flat.
Eco, Balanced, PremiumQuality presets in one click. Integrated GPUs start in Eco automatically.

04Model Engine

USD stages, IFC buildings, STEP parts and meshes, one engine.

USD, actually composedReferences, payloads, variants, class prototypes and native instancing all resolved on load. Verified against OpenUSD: the same 15,217,537 triangles, to the millimetre.
Every reopen in 1.6 sA stage that takes 59 s to compose the first time is cached, so it is never paid for twice.
Models arrive in componentsA tree in the scene panel, an eye on each, and double-click flies to the one under the cursor.
100,871 IFC entities in ~1 sPure-Rust ISO 10303-21 importer, IFC2x3 and IFC4, plus STEP B-rep, glTF and PLY. Drag and drop, like everything else.

05Voxel Engine

From scan to block world, live.

Up to 2048³ resolutionReal-time voxelization of any point cloud.
Minecraft viewOne click turns a survey into a lit block world.
glTF exportVoxel grids leave as GLB, ready for game engines and DCC tools.

063D Reconstruction

A phone video becomes a point cloud.

Video to 3D in ~15 sDrop a clip, get a colored 3D point cloud (warm run). Feed-forward VGGT reconstruction.
ONNX, DirectML and CUDAVRAM-adaptive sizing, graceful fallbacks when acceleration or models are absent.
Clips up to ~15 minWindowed Sim(3) gluing keeps long walks consistent, with automatic gravity-true orientation.

07Intelligence

From geometry to meaning, one click.

Four trained classifiersIndoor at 82% over ten classes, Outdoor land cover at 86%, plus Powerlines and Streetscape. They ship in every build, including the free one.
Powerlines classifierGround, vegetation, wire, pylon, with per-class show and hide isolation.
Unsupervised segmentationSelf-adaptive and parameter-free, with a fine border-sharp preset and per-segment analytics.
Robust normalsBenchmark-validated pipeline: bilateral PCA, MST plus gravity orientation, cached for reuse.

08Terrain & Change

Fit the ground, build the deliverable, measure what moved.

F1 90.3% against a national agency's own labelsCloth-simulation ground filter on an IGN LiDAR HD tile, 16.2 M points in 2.14 s, with no training data and no model file.
Nine products, one ground fit, one gridDTM, DSM, canopy height, slope, aspect, hillshade, contours, trees and clear-sky sunlight, written together so they cannot disagree.
M3C2, with a level of detectionUnchanged, gained, lost, and not observed. A 120 mm settlement found and a 10 mm one correctly reported unchanged, against a measured 14.9 mm threshold.
It leaves the programESRI ASCII Grid and GeoTIFF, opened again in GDAL to check, with a declared no-data sentinel.

09Toolbox

Measure it, cut it, film it.

Measurement that snapsPoint coordinates and 3D, horizontal, vertical distances via octree ray-picking.
Floor plans and sectionsRotatable section plane with live 3D preview, orthoimages up to 8192 px at full point density.
Flythrough to MP4Record a path, replay through a smoothing spline, bake every render mode at 720p to 1440p, 24 to 60 fps.
Screenshots and demosSave Image at 2x, a guided first-run tour, three built-in demo scenes.

10Performance

Engineered like an instrument.

60 fps with 2 billion pointsA 2,000,000,000-point cloud renders at 60 fps, out of core. 43.5M points measure ~110 fps at 1600x900.
10-year-old laptops welcomeOut-of-core streaming keeps memory bounded, so low-end machines open the same files as workstations.
Never a stallA VRAM residency pool pages detail in and out; clouds larger than the GPU still fly.
Measured, not guessedBuilt-in benchmark harness with recorded baselines behind every release.

11Distribution

One small file, yours.

15 MB, no installerA single self-contained Windows exe. macOS build pipeline ready.
Free tier, no clockView, import, navigate, and run all in-viewer processing. No account.
Bought once, yours to keepAn offline key, validated on your machine. No server, no subscription: every build from your 12 months is yours for good.
Engine & SDK, and academiaThe engine's source and the command line for teams who build on it; student and institute licences for teaching and research.
Torture-tested1,222 tests across 78 suites, a 17-case render QA matrix, and a malformed-file corpus that can no longer crash the app.

By the numbers

60 fps

with a 2,000,000,000-point cloud, out of core

~40M/s

LAZ points decompressed per second

~1 s

to reopen any indexed file, zero-copy

15 MB

single exe, no installer, no dependencies

1,222

tests across 78 suites, every release

2048³

maximum voxel grid resolution

8192 px

orthoimage export at full point density

~15 s

from phone video to 3D point cloud

Download free for Windows Explore every feature →

Questions, answered plainly.

The short version of everything people ask before downloading.

What file formats does Neurones 3D support?

Point clouds: LAS, LAZ, COPC, E57 (including 360 panoramas), PLY and NPY. Gaussian splats: PLY (INRIA) and SPZ (Niantic). Models and meshes: IFC (BIM), STEP (CAD), USD (Omniverse: .usd, .usda, .usdc, .usdz), glTF, GLB and PLY — a USD stage arrives fully composed, references and instancing resolved. Exports cover PLY, glTF/GLB, USDA, MP4 flythroughs, and PNG or JPEG orthoimages.

Does it run offline?

Yes, completely. Neurones 3D is a desktop application with no account, no cloud, and no telemetry. Even the paid editions are licensed offline: a key validated on your machine, with no activation server and no account.

What hardware do I need?

Any Windows 10 or 11 PC with a GPU, including 10-year-old laptops with integrated graphics. Integrated GPUs start in the Eco quality preset automatically, and the out-of-core engine streams clouds larger than your RAM or VRAM.

Is there a free version?

Yes, forever. The free tier is the whole viewer: every format, photoreal rendering, classification, segmentation, sections and measurement, with no trial clock. The Desktop edition, bought once and yours to keep, unlocks every export: drawings, rasters, reports, PLY, glTF, MP4 flythroughs and high-resolution orthoimages.

Can it handle billions of points?

Yes. The out-of-core LOD index streams from disk, so a 2,000,000,000-point cloud renders at 60 fps and the limit is your disk, not your RAM. A 43.5M-point scene renders at about 110 fps at 1600x900 on a mid-range GPU.

What is Neurones 3D written in?

Pure Rust, on the GPU-native wgpu graphics stack. No garbage collector, no runtime, no dependencies to install: the entire application is a single 15 MB Windows executable.

Name	Kind	What it is for	Kept
`n3d_board`	Cookie, HttpOnly	A random voter token set by the board (roadmap), so one browser counts as one vote.	12 months
`n3d-feedback-draft`	Local storage	A draft of the feedback form, so a refresh does not lose your message. It never leaves your browser and is cleared when you send.	Until sent
`n3d_consent`	Local storage	This choice.	6 months