Laser scanners produce point clouds: collections of 3D points describing the surfaces around them. I often needed to clean up these measurements in Blender, but first had to convert files from the PCD format used by the Point Cloud Library to PLY.

I wrote this add-on to import and export PCD files directly. It lets me use Blender’s editing tools to remove unwanted points, then save the result for use in the robotics software.

The add-on imports ASCII, binary and binary-compressed PCD files, and exports binary PCD files. It represents points as mesh vertices and does not preserve point colours or labels. See the repository for installation instructions and supported Blender versions.

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Importing a PCD file with blender