Points Workbench¶

In one sentence: The Points workbench imports, exports, and manipulates 3-D point clouds — unordered or structured grid — with optional per-point colour, normal, and intensity data, and bridges point cloud data into other FreeCAD workbenches such as Mesh and Inspection.

What is the Points workbench for?¶

A point cloud is a set of X, Y, Z coordinates sampled from the surface of a real object — typically produced by a 3-D laser scanner, structured-light scanner, or photogrammetry pipeline. Unlike a mesh or solid, a point cloud carries no connectivity: each point is independent.

The Points workbench provides tools to:

Import point clouds from scanner output files (.asc, .pcd, .ply, .e57).
Export them to standard formats.
Convert any FreeCAD geometry (mesh, solid) into a point cloud for downstream analysis.
Restructure an unordered scan into a width × height grid (structured cloud) for sensors that produce ordered images.
Cut a cloud interactively with a lasso to remove unwanted regions.
Merge multiple clouds into one.

Point clouds created in the Points workbench can be used directly as Actual geometry in the Inspection workbench.

Point cloud types¶

Type	C++ class	Description
Unstructured	`Points::Feature`	An unsorted list of X, Y, Z coordinates. This is the default after import.
Structured	`Points::Structured`	An ordered Width × Height grid of points. Invalid (missing) scan positions are represented by `NaN`.

Both types share the same Points property (a PropertyPointKernel). Structured additionally stores Width and Height integers.

Optional per-point attributes¶

Scanners often produce additional data alongside the X, Y, Z coordinates. FreeCAD stores these as optional extra properties:

Property	Class	Display mode
`Color`	`App::PropertyColorList`	Color — points coloured by their RGB value
`Normal`	`Points::PropertyNormalList`	Shaded — shading computed from per-point normals
`Intensity`	`Points::PropertyGreyValueList`	Intensity — greyscale based on scanner return intensity

The Display Mode setting in the View tab of the Properties panel selects which attribute is used for rendering. The default "Points" mode renders all points in a uniform colour.

File format support¶

Format	Extension	Import	Export	Notes
ASCII point list	`.asc`	✓	✓	Plain text X Y Z (one point per line), optional extra columns
PCD (Point Cloud Data)	`.pcd`	✓	✓	PCL-compatible binary or ASCII; supports fields, normals
PLY (Polygon File Format)	`.ply`	✓	✓	Supports colour and normal attributes
E57	`.e57`	✓	—	ASTM standard for 3-D imaging data, common from industrial scanners

Typical workflow¶

3-D scan output file
       │
       ▼
  Import Points  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────►  Points::Feature
                                                                              │
         ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
         │                                                                    │
         ▼                                                                    ▼
  Cut Point Cloud                                                  Structured Point Cloud
  (remove noise, clipping)                                        (order for sensor grid)
         │                                                                    │
         ▼                                                                    ▼
  Merge Point Clouds ──────────────────────────────────────────────►  merged cloud
         │
         ▼
  Inspection workbench (as Actual) or
  Mesh workbench (Convert to Points → reverse engineering)
         │
         ▼
  Export Points