Orbit Point Cloud

The Orbit Point Cloud (*.opc) is Orbit's native point cloud file storage format.
An OPC stores point geometry and attribute.

An Orbit Point Cloud file has extended data structure capabilities compared to other point cloud storage formats like LAS and E57.

An Orbit Point Cloud is built up of several OPC levels and depending on your zoom level when viewing the points, you see the OPC level which is best for rendering then. Level 1 consists of the least number of points, which is rendered when you're looking at the point cloud when you're zoomed out completely. The highest level consists of the highest number of points, which is rendered when looking very close to the points. If filtering is off, the highest level consists of all the points of the original point cloud.

The OPC is extremely optimized for fast viewing and querying of point cloud data in Orbit. The format is platform-independent without dependencies or the use of third-party libraries.
The unique technology makes it possible to view and use unlimited size point cloud resources.

The OPC is not optimized for storage volume.
The file size is similar to the LAS file, but options are available to filter points (homogeneous maximum point density) or strip attributes (delete Timestamp, R, G, B, I) at import to reduce the file size significantly.

• Convert Data
• Optimize Data
• Mapping Runs, Import 3D Mapping Data

When using an ASCII text file as a source file to create an OPC, a text_import.ini configuration file must be present in the source directory. This configuration file describes the file structure including the value separator as ASCII character code.

Example of geographical coordinates, including Intensity and RGB values. Space-separated.

ColumnNames lat;lon;z;i;r;g;b
Separator 32

Example of projected coordinates without additional attributes. Tab-separated.

ColumnNames x;y;z
Separator 9

Strip Attributes
Options to remove source attributes in the target point cloud file.
Removing timestamps if available will significantly reduce the point cloud file size.

Filter Points
Option to filter point cloud to avoid extreme point density peaks and to obtain an overall homogeneous maximum point density.

Block Size
The Block Size is a kind of cluster size for clustering the points between different OPC levels. The best block size is found if the ratio between the number of points in one level and its adjacent level is between 2 and 3. The Block Size affects storage, performance, and also filtering, if applied.

• Auto define density by random samples for optimized performance.
• Preset density for specific use cases:
  • TLS (Terrestrial LiDAR Scan) / High density / Block size 0.5
  • MLS (Mobile LiDAR Scan) / Medium density / Block size 1
  • ALS (Airborne LiDAR Scan) / Low density / Block size 50
• Custom block size. Choose a block size of your choice using the slider.

Importing a point cloud resource file to OPC is a one time process.
Processing time is affected by :

• Storage format of source data.
• Storage location of source and target.
• Processing and computing power.

For example, reading a LAS file from SSD to write an OPC to SSD storage using Intel i7 processor and 4GB Memory will take 2 Seconds per Million points.

The resource can be accompanied by an Orbit Legend File and Orbit Resource Descriptor.