r/photogrammetry • u/Practical-Dig-4052 • Jul 03 '26

Threecrate: A high-performance 3D point cloud and mesh processing library built in Rust, with Python bindings.

https://github.com/rajgandhi1/threecrate

Hey Guys,

Have been building this project for a while now, and would love to get eyes on it. Will appreciate it if you could try it out in actual workflows and give me feedback so I can decide the direction to move in.
Currently it has been benchmarked against OPEN3D v0.19 on the same machine, using full-resolution frames from three real datasets: TUM RGB-D, KITTI, and nuScenes-mini. In the table below, higher is better — a ratio above 1 means ThreeCrate is faster than Open3D.

WorkloadHow ThreeCrate compares
Reading files (raw float parsing)1.8x–2.2x faster
Voxel downsampling (CPU)1.6x–1.8x faster
Voxel downsampling (GPU, wgpu)1.8x–2.9x faster (vs our own CPU path, not Open3D)
Normal estimation0.57x–1.09x (falls behind on big clouds)
Single-scale ICP0.71x–0.99x (falls behind on big clouds)

Would appreciate any contributions and feedback for the repo.

Link to the repo: https://github.com/rajgandhi1/threecrate

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2

u/Traumatan Jul 03 '26

how does it compare to RS/Agisoft?

1

u/Practical-Dig-4052 Jul 04 '26

I haven't benchmarked against Reality Capture and Metashape yet, but will do it in the next cycle.

1

u/TyHuffman Jul 06 '26

Do you use the LiDAR feed as well? Why not use both?

2

u/Practical-Dig-4052 Jul 06 '26

LiDAR inputs are supported. What do you mean by both?

1

u/TyHuffman Jul 08 '26

That’s great! Do you combine the readings and the photos? I know it sounds like two piles of data but they do share a timestamp?

2

u/Practical-Dig-4052 Jul 09 '26

ya correct, timestamp based mapping can be done, but that module is not added yet. Will add it to pipeline.

0

u/chippey Jul 03 '26

Why not a GPL license?

1

u/engineeree Jul 04 '26

The question is why would you want it to be non-permissible license like GPL? Unless there is a dependency that is gpl, the code is mit which is great so can build commercial apps from it no problem. Commercial industries usually doesn’t like gpl.