Trimble Business Center

While significant improvements have been made on importing point clouds into TBC. We have introduced a very dangerous precedence in that when importing data TBC is at times shifting data or applying scale factors to data without fully notifying users that it has happened or what has gone on.

Generally as a user you expect the data in an imported file to be a 1:1 representation of the raw file by default and physically make a decision to change the data as an option. This currently isn't happening at the moment with some file formats causing a lot of problems down the track for users.

Yes, we have a message at the start indicating what is going on when importing some file formats such as some point cloud formats, however there is no indication to a user what has actually gone on and in a lot of cases they don't want a shift in the data.

This is particularly important with point clouds and scale factors, where TBC is applying scale factors to some data on import which sees a minor shift that isn't easily seen, however can result in significant errors.

Having a warning message come up on import stating that the import method is changing the raw data being imported by X, Y, Z and scale factor and allow users to say ok to continue or cancel to go back is going to save a lot of heartache for a lot of users here. 

Another way this could be solved is if we have a setting in the options, under point cloud (where we can turn off drone processing when coming into TBC) there is the ability to set the default for how data is imported into TBC according to the point cloud import menu. This way it can be set and users won't need to worry about it every time they import into TBC.

Currently this setting is remembered at the project level not the TBC level, so it needs to be reset every time a new project is created.