Color by distance

This option displays points according to their distance from a given plane. “Min. distance” and “Max. distance” are the minimum and maximum values that will be used to compare to the given plane. The “cut lower” and “cut upper” options will remove any points that are outside these limits. If these boxes remain unchecked, lower points will appear with the colors representing the extremities of the range of colors. The user may also set the minimum/maximum values with the “By Interval” option, for which an equidistant interval may be set. The range of colors for point display may be set manually and color palettes may be saved and loaded with the use of the appropriate icons - “Load color table” and “Save color table”.

The “Plane definition” section is used to select or create the plane to be used for the colorization. An existing plane may be selected by checking “Use existing plane” and by then selecting a plane in the dropdown list. “Detect plane” will ask the user to pick a point on the screen and will detect a plane according to the radius and tolerance parameters that have been set. “Create plane” is used to create planes directly within the window; you can either use “by 2 points” to pick 2 points to determine a vertical plane or “by 3 points” to pick 3 points to create a plane passing exactly by those 3 points.

A .PDF report can be created with this tool. The report will include a title, a subtitle, a histogram and a printscreen of the main viewer. To customize the title and subtitle, click on  next to the “Create report” button. To have values in the report’s histogram, “Compute histogram” will calculate the distribution of points within the defined ranges. It is important to note that all active points are included in the histogram calculation; to restrict the computation to the desired area it is important to use “cut lower” and “cut upper” options as well as to close off the area by using the "fence" or "clipping box" tool.

Annotations may be added to the report. To add an annotation, click on “Pick point” and pick an area in the main screen to be annotated. The next point picked will be the area where the label will be added. Repeat those steps to add as many annotations as needed and click on “Stop picking” when finished. To change the size or precision of annotations, go to settings (Settings / View / Measurements) and change “measurement text size” and “precision for distances”. To delete an annotation, click on “Delete” and click on the annotation on the screen to be deleted. Annotations may be exported to .TXT, .DXF, ESRI, Mapinfo,GeoJSON and KML file formats; click on "Export” to save them to the computer. Annotations are erased every time the user closes the “Color by distance” window.

Towards the bottom of the window, there is an icon to set the view perpendicular to the selected plane. Once everything is ready (the histogram is calculated, the title of the report is ready, the annotations have been added) clicking on “Create a report” will produce a .PDF report showing the histogram of the point distribution and a printout of the main window when the function is triggered. It is recommended to hide unwanted classes and scans or to create a fence around the zone to process before creating the report for better results.