Point Cloud Support

It would really make sense to support point clouds in Sketchup for iPad. I’ve been doing a lot of surveys with the iPad and Sketchup for iPad would be the perfect environment to import the point cloud and model it from scratch.

This would be cool, but difficult to achieve if you mean import a pointcloud file.
Different would be automatically generate geometry from the Lidar+Camera Apple ARKit…

Why would you say difficult? SketchUp for desktop has a point cloud plugin. Maybe it could be hard coded into SketchUp and used in iPad too

Cannot be done, at least not in the next few years: Scan Essential is powered by Trimble RealWorks Engine, that runs only on Win. A multi platform porting is desirable, but it will require a lot of optimizations… it won’t happen soon.

There are a few scanning apps that will generate a mesh from the scan. I have 3D Scanner App (Free) on my iPad and it can export a .ply file as a point cloud, but also export .DAE and .STL which will open natively in SketchUp. You will likely need to clean up that mesh once brought into SketchUp but depending on the size of the object or scan, this may be a good solution.

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It’s impossible to use one of that imported meshes as a base for architecture. The best process is to model from point clouds directly. I can do that in the desktop, but this is basic work that can be carried with basic tools and an ideal candidate for SketchUp for iPad. Other more sophisticated work can’t be achieved without plugins

The idea suits, but can’t be applied on battery powered devices like tablet or mobiles phones yet.
I believe someone one day will perfect these app/engine that recon/create mesh geometry from pointclouds/lidar sensors, so that we could import nearly perfect meshes into SketchUp (for iPad).

Let’s concentrate our feedbacks on other aspects on the SketchUp.app

Hi @MikeTadros even if other options are not to be excluded, having point clouds as a conceptual reference for fast mass studies or even for quick context building and modeling would be great. A Trimble scan essentials for iPad makes a lot of sense as the iPad is able to generate point clouds with the lidar in the camera setup

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