Import Point Clouds into Civil 3D

In this section, we will review bringing a point cloud into Autodesk Civil 3D. Remember that there are two file formats for point clouds within Civil 3D: RCP and RCS. If your files are not already converted into RCP or RCS, convert them in ReCap Pro before bringing them into Civil 3D.

Task: Bring a point cloud into Civil 3D

Start a new drawing. First, make sure your coordinate system is set correctly.

Open the “Settings” tab of “Toolspace”.
Right-click on your drawing and select “Edit Drawing Settings”.
In the “Units and Zone” tab, select your state and input your coordinate system code. For this project, you can type in CO83-CF in the Selected coordinate system code field.
Select “OK”.

Secondly, we want to check our units.

Key in “UNITS” in your command space.
When the “Drawing Units” window appears, check your “Insertion scale” and select “US Survey Feet”.
Select “OK”.

Select the “Insert” tab at the top of the screen.
Click “Attach” in the “Point Cloud” panel.
This will bring up a window titled “Select Point Cloud File”. Search for your file and click “Open”.
A window titled “Attach Point Cloud” will pop up. Deselect “Specify on-screen” and click “OK”.
This will bring your point cloud into Civil 3D
Select the point cloud. From here you can do several things:

Select “Scan Colors” from the “Visualization” panel to change the visual aspect of the point cloud.
Crop a certain part of the point cloud to focus on a certain area by selecting “Rectangular” in the “Cropping” panel and selecting a shape and cropping the area to focus on.

Bringing in a point cloud is quite simple, as you can see. We are now ready to start extracting geometry and creating surfaces from this point cloud.

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Import Point Clouds into Civil 3D

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