Working with point cloud data from PCL (Point Cloud Library) in robotics projects, I found myself constantly switching between different tools to visualise and edit .pcd files. While Blender is fantastic for mesh editing, it didn’t support PCD files natively - you’d have to convert to PLY format first, which was tedious when working primarily with point clouds.

This frustration led me to create a Blender add-on that brings PCD import/export directly into Blender 2.8+. Now I can load point clouds straight from my robotics workflows, use Blender’s powerful editing tools to clean up noisy data, and export back to PCD format without any intermediate conversions.

The add-on handles the most common PCD formats (ASCII, binary, and binary compressed) and integrates seamlessly with Blender’s existing import/export system. While it doesn’t support coloured point clouds yet (due to how Blender handles mesh vertices), it’s been incredibly useful for preprocessing LiDAR data and cleaning up point clouds before feeding them into computer vision pipelines.

View/Download project on GitHub

Importing a PCD file with blender