CloudCompare forum

I encountered an issue with the alignment of point clouds. The data consists of an airborne scan point cloud (ALS) and two terrestrial point clouds (TLS). The ALS scan serves as the reference point cloud. I have moved one of the TLS clouds (using Translate/Rotate) approximately to align with the ALS cloud and aligned (using the "Align - Point Picking" method) the second TLS cloud to the first TLS cloud.

So, the point clouds are displayed with the correct transformation/orientation, but the actual coordinates of the TLS clouds are far off from the ALS cloud. How can I set the transformation of these three aligned clouds to "as is" so that they are correctly oriented for export as single LAS files? Do I need to align the TLS clouds using the "Align" function as well, or can I apply the "moved" clouds orientation?

Thanks!

Yes, I guess the TLS clouds don't have the same "Global shift" as the ALS one (which probably has large coordinates).

If you had used the Align tool between the TLS clouds (as to-be-aligned entities) and the ALS one (as the reference entity), it would have automatically transferred the Global Shift to the TLS cloud.

But the easiest way for you now is probably to manually set the Global Shift on the TLS clouds. You can use 'Edit > Edit global shift and scale'. With this you can copy the 3 shift values from the ALS cloud, and then set the same values for the 2 TLS clouds.