Trimble Business Center

Cleaning up point cloud data can become time consuming depending on terrain.  Generally in the sites that we fly our drone the surface is bare earth.  During the growing season or summer months the site condition can develop shrubs/grass/water and so on.  When producing cross sections from a surface that hasn't been cleaned up to remove the spikes in data, the bad data is easily viewed in the cross section viewer and 3D view.  When cleaning up the cloud data it's easy to miss something that is picked up when the surface is created.  At that point it can become a chore in continued editing of the data.  The ability to edit the cross section data only would be a huge enhancement. The option to reduce the quality of the surface by increasing the sample size of the CAD or cloud data helps but isn't a complete fix.

Have you tried using the Surface Slicer View - that has the ability to use a HAL and create "Sliced Cross Section Samples of the Point Cloud (you can define the width of the sample parallel to the sliced Cross Section. In that view you can Select / Delete, Draw lines in the Surface Slicer View e.g. you can draw a "Cross Section" (use the Polyline command not linestring to snap into the plane of the cutting plane). You can set your step interval to be e.g. 5' or 10' and your plane width to be 0.1' or 5'whatever and then you can see a Cross Section Sample and manipulate it accordingly - I use this all the time to clean up Road or alignment based (e.g. Trenches etc) Point Cloud Data and I think it will do what you want.

The enclosed Video may help - there have been some additions since this video was captured that allow you now to create many cross section locations and make it easier to step through the cutting planes - but the concepts are similar - in this video I don't show how to edit the point clouds, but e.g. Polygon Select will work in Cutting Plane View and you can add point cloud selections to a Point Cloud Region etc from here

Alan