How to share a point cloud with a client

Why this is harder than it should be

A point cloud is not a normal deliverable. It is a dense set of measured points, and the files are big. A quick drone flight might land at one or two gigabytes. A full terrestrial scan of a building or an intersection runs ten, twenty, sometimes fifty gigabytes once you keep all the returns. That is the first problem.

The second problem is the person on the other end. Your client is usually an architect, a general contractor, a property owner, a city reviewer, or a lawyer. None of them have Civil 3D, ReCap, or CloudCompare installed. Most of them are not going to install anything to look at a file you sent. And a point cloud is inherently three dimensional, so the moment you flatten it into a screenshot or a PDF you have thrown away the thing that made it worth capturing.

So the job is to move a very large 3D file to a non-technical person and let them actually look at it, rotate it, and pull a measurement off it, without asking them to become a survey technician for an afternoon. Most of the common approaches fail at least one of those tests.

The common ways people do it, and where each one breaks

Zip it and drop it in Dropbox or Google Drive

This is the default for a lot of firms. You zip the LAZ, upload it to a shared folder, and send the link. It does move the file. The trouble is what happens after the client clicks. They download fifteen gigabytes over whatever connection their office has, wait, and then end up with a .laz on their desktop that nothing on their machine can open. Now you are on the phone explaining what software they need. LAZ also does not preview, so the folder just shows a file icon.

WeTransfer or a similar send service

Slightly faster to set up, same ending. The client downloads a giant file they cannot open, and WeTransfer links expire in a few days on the free tier, so the deliverable you sent in March is dead by the time someone asks about it in May. Send services move bytes. They do not solve viewing and they do not last.

FTP or an SFTP handoff

Some surveyors still keep an FTP server around for exactly this. It handles the size fine. But now you are emailing a client a host, a username, a password, and a port, and asking them to find an FTP client. Half of them will not get through it without a screen share. And again, even if they pull the file down, they still cannot open it.

Tell them to install CloudCompare or Potree

CloudCompare is free and genuinely good. So is rolling your own Potree page. The catch is that you are asking a client to install desktop software, or asking yourself to stand up and host a web build, just so one person can glance at a deliverable. CloudCompare has a real learning curve. A property owner is not going to figure out the navigation, the scalar fields, or how to take a distance. You will get a call. Self-hosting Potree means you are now also a web host, converting clouds to an octree by hand and keeping a server alive.

Screenshots or a PDF

This is what people fall back to when everything above is too much. You spin the cloud to a few nice angles, screenshot them, and drop them in a PDF or an email. It is easy and the client can open it. But you have deleted the entire point of a point cloud. They cannot rotate it, they cannot check a clearance you did not happen to capture, and they cannot measure anything. You will be back in the file taking the next angle they ask for.

The modern way: send a streaming viewer link

The approach that finally passes every test is to put the cloud behind a web viewer and send a link to it. The file lives on a server that streams it. When the client opens the link, the browser only pulls the points the camera can currently see, not the whole fifty gigabytes. That is why a big scan can open in a few seconds on a normal laptop, and why it works on a phone in the field.

Done right, this gives you the things the other methods each missed at once:

• No install on their end. The link opens in any modern browser. No account, no plugin, no desktop software, no FTP client.
• The 3D stays 3D. The client can orbit, zoom, and look at the part they care about instead of the three angles you happened to screenshot.
• They can measure. A good viewer lets them pull a distance or a spot elevation themselves, which kills a whole category of follow-up emails.
• Size stops mattering. Because it streams, a quick drone flight and a fifty gigabyte terrestrial scan open the same way.
• You can lock it down. Put a password on sensitive data and revoke the link when the project closes. The link is the deliverable, and you control it.

You can also color the cloud by RGB, by elevation, by intensity, or by classification, and leave annotation pins with notes so the cloud explains itself. The client opens it and understands what they are looking at without a phone call.

How this works in practice

This is the whole reason ViewerFX exists. You upload a LAS or LAZ from the browser, it gets converted to a streaming format, and you get one link per file. The person you send it to needs nothing but a browser, and the link does not expire on a schedule, so a deliverable you sent in spring still opens in the fall. Add a password when the data is sensitive, see whether the client actually opened it, and revoke the link when you are done.

If you just want to see what your client would see, the free viewer opens a cloud in your browser with no signup at all. Drop in a file and rotate it. When you are ready to start sending links, the pricing is based on storage rather than per-seat fees, because the people you share with should never have to pay to look at their own deliverable.

The short version: stop emailing files nobody can open and stop flattening 3D data into screenshots. Put the cloud behind a link and let the client look at it the way you do.