hi all..

I notice there is a pcopenlod() new to 11. Does this allow a particle cloud to be accessed in tiled fashion so that it does not have to be completely loaded into RAM?

thanks!

Greetings,

pcopenlod() creates a “level-of-detail” (LOD) based point cloud. What this means is that some of the point values returned by a query may be average values of entire groups of points. The advantage of this approach is speed: fewer points are returned by the query, so you can pciterate() over them more quickly. Furthermore, these “average” values are computed once and cached, so look-ups are quick.

To answer your question, pcopenlod() does not offer memory savings; in fact, opening a point cloud with pcopenlod() requires more memory than with pcopen() because the entire point cloud is stored in memory along with averaged point values. What it does give you are fast queries when you are interested in retrieving values from many points.

–Ian