Workflows

Step-by-step recipes for the common tasks. Each workflow is self-contained — start at the top, follow along, end with a result.

Every operation is reachable from the always-visible toolbar (left of the viewer) and from the menu bar. Tools are spread across three menus: Create (build the scene — geometry and scanner placement), Simulate (synthesize scans), and Tools (analysis operations on existing data — pre-processing, segmentation, reconstruction & analysis, registration). The left toolbar shows two of these as blocks — Create and Tools; the Simulate action (Run Synthetic Scan) lives in the Simulate menu and on the Scans panel. These workflows are grouped by the four stages of a typical processing pipeline.

Getting around

• Import & export — getting data in and out of Phytograph.

• Viewer navigation — moving the camera, switching color modes, isolating an object.

• Export from RiPROCESS — get RIEGL scans out with the fields Phytograph needs.

1. Pre-processing

• Clean a point cloud — translate, crop, erase, filter, resample. Get a scan ready for analysis.

• Backfill misses — recover the sky/miss rays that LAD needs from a scan that dropped them.

• Register & compare — align clouds with ICP and stitch overlapping scans into one.

2. Segmentation

• Segment ground points — classify and remove the ground with the Cloth Simulation Filter.

• Separate leaf and wood — split a scan into woody and foliage points by local geometry.

• Segment individual trees — separate a multi-tree cloud into per-tree instances.

3. Reconstruction & analysis

• Triangulate a mesh — Delaunay, Ball Pivot, Poisson, and Helios multi-scan triangulation.

• Fit a crown & metrics — wrap the canopy in a fitted shape and read off height, volume, and width.

• Generate a DEM — build a bare-earth DTM, a top-of-canopy DSM, or a canopy height model.

• Extract a skeleton — pull branch topology out of a woody scan.

• Build a QSM — reconstruct a dormant tree as connected cylinders with radii, continuous shoots, and shoot rank.

• Add leaves to a QSM — place leaves on terminal shoots using phyllotaxis.

• Adjust leaf angles — match a measured leaf-angle distribution on a foliated QSM.

• Estimate leaf area density — invert overlapping scans against a voxel grid into an LAD grid (m²/m³).

4. Scan simulation

• Generate a plant — produce a procedural plant from species, age, and position.

• Morph a plant — edit geometry parameters interactively and regrow.

• Simulate a LiDAR scan — place a virtual scanner and synthesize the point cloud it would produce.