sent on january 26, 2024
I love the tech and consistent innovation in recon. Experimenting with new tools and methods in pursuit of improvement blows my hair back. This week, while exploring a new technique, I stumbled on a piece of software that's been around for almost a decade but escaped my awareness.
NUBIGON Pro
I’m a huge CloudCompare fan. It’s free, snappy, stable, and super capable. However, this week I was trying to create an x-ray rendering of a point cloud and came across NUBIGON. From their site: “NUBIGON Pro is a point cloud visualization and animation software for the reality capture industry. We help our users to efficiently engage with massive datasets, easily combine deliverables, and effectively showcase their services.”
Born from the doctoral research of co-founder Murat Arikan, the program offers some unique tools that convinced me to spring for the monthly license, specifically:
X-ray: The technical beauty of these renderings is impressive (see rendering of this exemplar below)
Cleaning: This tool appears to be more sophisticated than competitors' offerings.
Orthophotos: Useful for creating orthophotos of tree-covered roadways. Unlike photo-based orthos, here you can chop out trees and render a clean road.
Animation: Offers a bit more control and feedback than CloudCompare
Lighting: Allows for adding point, spot, and directional lights, with responsive point clouds, a feature also present in CloudCompare and Virtual CRASH.
While I've learned to create x-ray renderings in Meshlab (which is free) and we're working on integrating this function into CloudCompare, the results from NUBIGON are currently superior. Keep an eye out for related tutorials. I also plan to explore Arena4D and Cyclone 3DR soon. If you have any other software recommendations, please let me know!
Make it a stellar weekend!
Lou Peck
Lightpoint | Axiom
