Load and view
Display, quality presets and the voxel view
Change how the data looks without changing the data - colour by any column, points or surface, a quality preset that suits the GPU, and a voxel view up to 2048 cells a side.
Every display option is free. Exporting voxels as glTF is Pro.
When to use it
All the time. Colour by height to read a floor, by intensity to read a road, by confidence
after a classification, by hag after a ground fit. Switch to crisp points to measure, to the
surface to present. Drop to Eco on a weak GPU and to Premium for a screenshot.
Step by step
- Open Properties › Display (the right pane). Set Point size with the slider.
- Under Colour by, choose RGB, Height (a ramp on elevation), Normals, or any scalar field the cloud carries or N3D computed: intensity, classification,
hag,confidence,deviationand so on. - In the toolbar, Eye-dome lighting gives depth edges to raw points; Surface reconstruction turns the points into a continuous lit surface with hole infill (off gives crisp EDL points). Surfels in Display draws each point as a small oriented disc.
- Pick a Quality preset: Eco (no supersampling, no effects, a 3 million point budget, for integrated graphics), Balanced (effects on at native resolution) or Premium (2x supersampling, sharpening and every effect). Advanced effects holds ambient occlusion, hole infill, SSAA and sharpening one by one.
- For the voxel view, press the Voxel view chip in Display, or Process › Voxelize…. A Resolution slider appears: 40 to 2048 cells along the longest side, 140 by default. The cubes take the colour the cloud was showing.
- If the model or scan lies on its side, set Up axis at the top of Display (Z up, Y up, Y up flipped, X up, upside down).
- To export the voxel grid for a game engine or a DCC tool, use File › Export voxels as glTF….
What it was measured at
The voxel view goes up to 2048 cells a side. Integrated GPUs start in Eco automatically on first launch.
From the command line
n3d-render-cli render --input scan.las --out height.png --color height
n3d-render-cli render --input scan.las --out points.png --points # crisp EDL points, no surface
n3d-render-cli render --input scan.las --out blocks.png --voxel 256
n3d-render-cli export-voxel-gltf --input scan.las --out voxels.glb --res 160Limits, stated
- Display changes how the cloud is drawn, never the file. A colour ramp is not written into an export unless you tick the column itself.
- Surfels are forced off in Eco.
Related questions
What hardware do I need?
A 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 PC with a GPU that supports DirectX 12 or Vulkan. Integrated graphics work: they start in the Eco quality preset, which drops supersampling and effects for smoothness. See system requirements.
Do I need a lot of memory?
Less than the file size. Point clouds are indexed out of core and streamed, so a cloud larger than your RAM still opens. Composing a large USD stage for the first time is the heaviest case measured: 6.5 GB peak for a 900,000-prim stage, after which every reopen reads a cache in 1.64 s.
More in the FAQ.