Does Nira support point cloud files?

Point Cloud Preview Phase

Point cloud support is currently in a private preview phase exclusive to specific Enterprise plans.  Please reach out to us if you wish to enable Point Cloud support for your Enterprise account.

Please do NOT share URLs, screenshots, or videos of point cloud assets on social media platforms at this time. We intend to make an official announcement in the coming weeks. If you have any assets you'd like to share with us for our promotional release, we would greatly appreciate it. We would of course credit any contribution. Any point cloud data uploaded during the preview phase might not be compatible with the final release and will likely be removed from your account automatically.

Current Features:

• The Nira viewer supports datasets (Laser scans / LiDAR) with an unlimited amount of points.
• Filetype support: E57, LAS, and LAZ.  You can upload multiple point cloud files together in a single asset, but they must be uploaded together at the same time.
• Bubble/360 Panoramic views are supported with E57 files. 
• Point cloud files can now be uploaded with any other file (i.e., mesh, image files, orthomosaics, *.rcinfo, .txt, or anything else).
• As of 2024-12-08: Public sharing of point cloud assets is now available for select Enterprise plans.  You can use Public Nira URLs (no login required) to share your assets or continue utilizing the User sharing options for sharing. 

Current Limitations to be addressed in a future update:

• Files cannot be added to an asset that already includes point cloud data.
• Processing point cloud data can be time consuming. There are still many opportunities for optimization, and we plan to improve this in the future.
• .laz files with COPC data is not supported. If you wish to upload .laz files, turn off the COPC option in your .laz exporting tool. If an option to turn off COPC isn't available, please use .las instead.

Choose "Photogrammetry" when uploading Point Cloud files.

Uploading a PLY, OBJ, or FBX file that contains point cloud data will fail to process or render.  To determine if an OBJ file is formatted as a point cloud file, open it in a text editor and look for the presence of "f" -- specially the letter f followed by a space, without quotes. The absence of a line starting with "f" indicates that the OBJ file has no triangles or faces and was exported as a point cloud.

Note:  We'll update this article with every significant update.  Feel free to register an account on our help center and click the Follow button to receive notifications when the feature becomes available.