Load and view
Navigate, fly and record a flythrough video
Move around the scene with the mouse or like a game, record the camera as you go, and bake the path into one MP4 per render mode.
Navigating and recording are free. Saving the path and exporting video are Pro.
When to use it
Orbit and dolly for inspection; fly mode for standing inside a building or walking a corridor at eye level; a recorded flythrough when the result has to be shown to someone who will not open the software. The same path can be baked in several looks (lit surfaces, crisp points, coloured by height) without being flown twice.
Step by step
- Orbit with the left mouse button, pan with the right or middle button (or Shift and left), dolly with the wheel. Double-click a point to fly the camera to it.
- The toolbar button Frame the scene brings everything back into view.
- For fly mode, press the Fly navigation toggle in the toolbar or tick Fly mode (game) in Navigation. Move with WASD or the arrow keys, rise with E or Space, sink with Q, drag to look, and set the cruise speed with the wheel; Shift triples it.
- To record, open Navigation › Flythrough video and press Record flythrough. Move the camera as you want the video to move. Press Stop recording; the card shows the length and the number of keys.
- Press Export video(s)… (or File › Export Flythrough…). Choose Resolution (720p, 1080p or 1440p) and Frame rate (24, 30 or 60 fps), then tick one or more render modes: surfaces, EDL points, colour by height, colour by any scalar field, the voxel view, or segment colours.
- Press Generate video(s)… and choose where to save. The path is replayed through a smoothing spline; each ticked mode becomes its own MP4.
- To reuse a path later or render it headlessly, File › Save Flythrough… writes it as JSON, and File › Open Flythrough… loads it back.
What it was measured at
Video is baked at 720p to 1440p and 24 to 60 fps. A 43.5 million point scene renders at 9.0 ms a frame (median) in the viewer.
Keys at a glance
| Input | Does |
|---|---|
| Left drag | Orbit |
| Right drag, middle drag, Shift + left drag | Pan |
| Wheel | Dolly (in fly mode: cruise speed) |
| Double-click | Fly to the point under the cursor |
| W A S D or arrows | Fly forward, left, back, right |
| E or Space, Q | Up, down |
| Shift | Three times faster |
| F3 | Level-of-detail overlay |
From the command line
# bake a saved path to MP4 headlessly
n3d-render-cli path --input scan.las --path flythrough.json --out walk.mp4 --width 1920 --height 1080 --fps 60
# author a path without flying it: a slow orbit that closes in
n3d-render-cli gen-path --input scan.las --out flythrough.json --seconds 12 --turns 0.65
# a turntable as PNG frames and a GIF
n3d-render-cli orbit --input scan.las --out-dir frames --frames 120 --gif turntable.gifLimits, stated
- Without ffmpeg on the machine, frames are written as PNG folders instead of MP4, and the dialog says so.
- Segment colours is only offered once the scene has been segmented.
- Headless video and saved paths need a licence: the command line reads it from
N3D_LICENSE.
Related questions
How large a point cloud can it handle?
The limit is the disk, not the memory. The index is built out of core with bounded RAM and memory-mapped back: 43.5 million points open in about 1.2 s, and a 127.8 million point, 7.9 GB E57 in about 22 s. Very large clouds are classified in tiles automatically.
What does a paid licence unlock?
Writing out what the program worked out: computed columns (class, segment, confidence, height above ground, deviation) on an export, drawings (DXF, PDF, SVG), terrain rasters, GIS vectors, meshes as glTF, reports, region and zone CSVs, saved images and flythrough videos. Desktop, Engine & SDK and the academic licence unlock the same features in the program; Engine & SDK adds the Python package and the command line. The boundary is enforced in code and tested in both directions.
More in the FAQ.