Potree, rebuilt for real-world reality capture
Potree is a free, open-source WebGL point cloud renderer that streams billions of LiDAR and photogrammetry points straight into your browser — no plugins, no installs. This page is the field journal of how we reshaped Potree 1.8.2 into the engine behind 360ForYou: dozens of additions aimed squarely at surveyors, BIM coordinators, and anyone who lives inside 3D scan data — from deviation heat-maps and streaming 360° panoramas to IFC/BIM overlays and a scan you can literally walk through.
We've dropped exact line numbers on purpose — they go stale the moment the next edit lands. Instead, each entry below tells you what changed and why it matters. Everything here sits on top of stock Potree; the base engine is the work of Markus Schütz and contributors.
Rendering that respects your hardware
Stock Potree redraws every single frame, forever — even when nothing on screen has moved. We made rendering on-demand: the viewer keeps updating logic, controls and point streaming every frame, but the expensive GPU draw only fires when something actually changes. A static scene drops to near-zero GPU load, and your laptop fan finally calms down.
- Draw only when needed — camera motion, streaming points, animations and 360° transitions trigger a frame; a still view costs almost nothing.
- Background tabs pause entirely, then catch up the instant you return.
- VR is never gated — the headset drives the camera every frame, so it always renders smoothly.
- Leaner production build — development console logging stripped out and a stack of unused loader classes removed.
New ways to read your point cloud
A point cloud is only as useful as what you can see in it. We added two new shading modes that turn raw XYZ into insight.
- Surface normals — clouds that carry per-point normals (for example from an E57 scan) can be shaded by orientation, so flat grey data suddenly reveals walls, floors and curvature at a glance.
- Deviation heat-map — a brand-new blue → white → red colour mode that paints each point by its signed deviation value. Perfect for scan-to-scan registration checks or comparing an as-built capture against a reference model. A companion deviation filter hides everything outside a chosen tolerance, so you can isolate exactly where reality drifts from plan.
- Smarter blending — independent RGB / intensity / elevation weighting, and a sensible "other" fallback class for unclassified points.
Measurements you can trust
Survey work demands precision and legibility. Every measurement readout was tightened up.
- Millimetre precision everywhere — distances, coordinates, heights and volumes now report to three decimals, with thousands separators for big numbers.
- Height+ tool — a new height measurement that also reports the horizontal projection and the angles of the run, so a sloped measurement gives you the full triangle in one click.
- Deviation readout shown right inside the coordinate label when a cloud carries deviation data.
- Readable labels — clean, semi-transparent backgrounds keep numbers legible over busy, colourful clouds.
- Precise placement — measurement vertices drop exactly where you click, instead of drifting with the cursor.
Walk through your scan fan favourite
The most fun thing we built: drop a little 3D character into your point cloud and stroll around it. WASD to move, Q/E (or R/F) to change height, mouse to look. The arms and legs swing, the head bobs, and the camera follows over the shoulder.
It sounds like a toy, but it's a genuinely intuitive way to judge scale and get a human's-eye sense of a captured space — far more relatable than orbiting a cloud from outside. Your avatar's position travels with saved scenes, so you reappear right where you left off.
360° panoramas, done properly
Photo-spheres let you stand inside the moment a scan was taken. We rebuilt how they load and behave so the experience feels instant and uncluttered.
- Cube-in-cube streaming — each panorama shows an immediate low-res preview, then high-resolution faces fade in on top as they download. No black screen, no waiting for the whole image.
- Double-click to step inside — and only the panoramas linked to your current spot stay visible, so a dense project doesn't drown you in spheres.
- On-screen sizing — grow or shrink the sphere markers with
+/−buttons; sphere colour adapts to a light or dark background. - Rock-solid picking — hover and selection work correctly even in orthographic mode, and the view locks to perspective inside a panorama, then restores your previous projection when you step out.
Point clouds meet BIM & CAD
Reality capture is most powerful next to the design intent. The viewer now loads 3D models right alongside your cloud.
- IFC, OBJ and GLB models load directly into the scene, with automatic lighting and a dedicated CADs branch in the scene tree for per-model visibility.
- Clip Targets — your clipping boxes can now cut through CAD geometry too, not just points. One toggle switches between "point cloud only" and "everything", with correct inside/outside behaviour handled by native Three.js clipping planes.
- Progress feedback while large models stream in, so nobody stares at a blank screen wondering if it's working.
Clipping & sections that stick around
Cutting away clutter to inspect a slice of the model is core to the workflow — so we made it persistent and unobtrusive.
- Box and polygon clip volumes are saved with the scene, including each one's inside / outside mode — reopen a link and your sections are exactly as you set them.
- Navigate straight through clip boxes — they no longer steal your mouse when you try to orbit or pan past them.
- "Clear all measurements" leaves clip volumes intact, so a quick tidy-up doesn't wipe your carefully placed sections.
Save the whole scene, not just the camera
Sharing a viewpoint used to mean sharing a camera angle. Now a saved scene captures everything that makes the view useful:
- Material settings — colour gradient, gamma, brightness, contrast, and RGB / intensity / elevation weights.
- Visibility of every object: point clouds, measurements, annotations, 360° spheres and CAD models.
- Clip volumes (box and polygon), splat quality, display units — and even your walkable avatar's position.
- Shareable deep-links — a URL can drop a viewer straight onto a specific camera position, panorama or saved settings, ideal for pointing a colleague at exactly the right spot.
Open a saved link and the scene rebuilds itself precisely as you left it.
Put it on the map — and the globe
Geo-referenced scans deserve geographic context. We retired Potree's ageing built-in map and wired in something far richer.
- Unified mini-map with OpenStreetMap, topographic and satellite layers, plus KML/KMZ and GeoTIFF overlays — with a privacy gate that asks before loading any third-party map tiles.
- Globe mode streams the Potree camera onto a Cesium 3D globe, so you can see your scan sitting in the real world, complete with a height-offset slider to drop it neatly onto the terrain.
Units, your way
Coordinates and measurements are now fully independent. Store your scene in feet but read measurements in metres — or any other combination of metres, feet and inches. Set it once, and it's applied consistently across every readout in the viewer.
Speak your language
Added a full Russian interface alongside English, French and German, and trimmed the language preload to what's actually in use — fewer downloads, faster startup.
The bug that took three days
Some fixes are a single character and cost an entire weekend. Cross-section profiles of point clouds were silently refusing to draw — no error, no warning, just nothing on screen.
The culprit: an attribute's element-count was computed from the wrong field for RGBA colour, so the profile extractor quietly produced an empty result every time. One corrected line — immortalised in the source with a comment that politely reads "it cost me three days to find that line" — and profiles render perfectly again.
Every codebase has one of these. This was ours.
Under the hood
The unglamorous-but-important maintenance that keeps everything fast and current.
- Charts upgraded to D3 v7 — the profile graph rebuilt on the modern API.
- Point budget widened to 1M – 100M points, so high-end machines can push far more detail.
- Smaller bundle — unused binary/EPT/node loaders and the old compass widget removed.
- Sensible defaults — navigation cube on, a larger starting point budget, and clip set to "show inside" out of the box.
- Engine version stamped
1.8.2.