Brekel PointCloud v3

One sensor or many, mixed as you like

The app works with one or more sensors, connected to one or more machines, and different sensor brands and types can be mixed. Sensor alignment calibration (using a printed marker or a person walking through the volume) and data fusion are built in: extra sensors see angles the others miss, which reduces occlusion holes and can grow the capture volume. Everything is visualized and recorded in real time; conversion to the output file formats happens in an offline post-processing stage.

For multi-machine setups you run the GUI on one machine and the included console version on the others, streaming their sensors over the network. The code is highly multi-threaded C++, so it scales with sensor count and CPU cores.

Which is also why there is no single hardware requirement to quote: what you need depends on how many sensors you run and which type they are. The documentation goes into it, and the free trial is the easiest way to find out whether your own machine keeps up. Volumetric recordings are large in any case, so fast disk with room on it is the one thing worth having regardless of sensor count.

Running a Kinect v2 on Windows 11? If it keeps dropping out and reconnecting a few seconds into a recording, that is a Windows audio setting rather than the sensor or the port: see Kinect v2 keeps disconnecting on Windows 11.

Timeline, meshing and export

Recordings land on a simple timeline where you can arrange, trim and offset clips, mix in WAV audio, and export everything in one go. A separate batch processor handles multiple files without the main app. Audio can be recorded in sync from any Windows audio device.

Meshes can be generated with a fast Quick & Dirty mode or with TSDF and Poisson fusion algorithms, with several texturing options. Recordings come out as animated meshes (Alembic and OBJ being the ones most 3D packages read, plus the Sense of Space SenseXR format for XR playback), as point and particle caches covering the major VFX, CAD and survey formats, or as image sequences and video. The full list:

• Meshes: Alembic, RealFlow BIN, OBJ, PLY, and the Sense of Space SenseXR format (including Unity integration)
• Points/particles: Alembic, RealFlow BIN, BGEO, E57, GEO, LAS, OBJ, PCD, PDA, PDB, PDC, PLY, PRT, PTC, PTS, PTX, RIB, XYZ / XYZRGB, and the UnityCoder Point Cloud Viewer binary format
• Textures: JPG, PNG (color and raw depth), TGA, TIFF, video (H264, H265, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4/XVID/DIVX, MJPEG) and OpenEXR (color, alpha, raw depth, xyz)

For playback in game engines there is also the free Geometry Sequence Player for Unity by BuildingVolumes and a Godot integration by Jeffrey L. Gangwisch.

Licensing

The free trial is the full application with one limit: recordings stop at 10 seconds. Network sensors do work in the trial, so a multi-machine setup can be tested before buying, and so can alignment, fusion, meshing and every export format.

A license is perpetual: it never expires and you can always run and install the application. It includes one year of maintenance updates for the v3 branch; after that you keep using what you have, or buy a one-year maintenance update when you want newer versions.

The Single Sensor license uses one sensor at a time (any brand or type). The Multi Sensor license uses as many sensors as you want, on one machine or across networked machines. How trials, evaluations and licenses work in general: see licensing.