CloudCompare forum

Dear Daniel and All,
I am struggling a lot to solve the following issue. I need to co-register 2 clouds deriving from Metashape because they differ of about few meters (different GPS used to take marker coordinates). I save the clouds in LAS and import them in CC 2.14: one as reference, the other to align on the previous. No matter if I skip (not apply) the global shift transformation at the importation or apply it, when I export the aligned cloud into Metashape again to build the DEM, it does not match the DEM of the reference cloud into ArcGIS. I tried to:

a) not apply the global shif --> difficult to properly see the points in a UTM coordinte system and I obtained a squeezed cloud in metashape
b) apply the shift only on the reference cloud --> no aligment in ArcGIS
c) apply the shift only on the align cloud --> no aligment in ArcGIS
d) apply the shift on both --> no aligment in ArcGIS

Of course I also tried to reapply the CC shift when importing the aligned cloud in Metashape with all the above combinations, nothing changes.
I realy don't know what I am missing.

Thank you very much for your interest,
Stefano

And what happens when you reopen these files in CloudCompare?

Normally, you should always apply the Global Shift(s) so as to not lose any information/precision. And then the registration tools should automatically apply the Global Shift of the reference entity to the aligned one.

Hi Daniel,
thank you for your suggestion! The registered clouds, once imported in CC, are correctly aligned. It still is strange that, for a few meters of GCPs error, CC suggests a shift of thousands of meters for one cloud and only 1000 meters for the second. While exporting them from CC I also tried many combinations: "use current global shift", "original LAS offset" and custom shift that is the difference of the previous two. The resulting DEMs are always not overlapping into GIS.
I'm sorry,
Stefano