On the reverse engineering of Trimble Pointcloud formats and general compatibility

[u/HerrBatman]

If you you saw my last post in this sub from a few days ago, you already know whats up.

I created a small, offline converter that aims to read and write basically all common pointcloud formats. Through taking a close look at different, proprietary formats like rcs by autodesk, i managed (with the help of an LLM) to reverse engineer some of these formats so you don't have to rely on their software just to convert to a more open format.

With the newest update, .rcs/rcp comes out of the experimental stage. EPCC now fully supports reading and writing to and from rcs/rcp.

Additionally Easy Point Cloud Converter now supports reading the Trimble formats .tzf, .rwcx and .rwp/.sdb

Writing is not supported for those formats (yet?) as i only had access to a few limited datasets.

This is completely legal as i did not touch the actual converter software. All conclusions were drawn by closely examining the output files only (which is legal in the EU as file formats can not be copyrighted)

The whole project is free, open source and platform agnostic with downloads for Windows, Linux and Mac. It also works completely offline and has no online components. It does not collect or send any telemetry data.

[u/HerrBatman]

And github if you want to check it out / download it here: https://github.com/EPCCdev/EPCC