PurpleGeo User Guide

From point clouds to a clearer understanding of a place.

PurpleGeo is a workspace for exploring, measuring, comparing, and communicating 3D survey data. Bring in a LiDAR survey, laser scan, or elevation model; move through it at full site scale; then get close enough to answer a particular question.

Sometimes that question is simple: What am I looking at? How high is that wall? Is the pipe where the drawing says it is? Sometimes it is harder: How has this slope changed? Which part of the site needs another look? Can the team reviewing the job see exactly what I mean?

The point is to make those questions approachable without turning every inspection into a large data-processing exercise. PurpleGeo starts with the measured geometry. You can change how you look at it, cut through it, mark it up, and share the part of the story that matters.

This is a practical guide to the current application as of 22 October 2026. It covers the controls, but also explains why you might use them and how they fit into a real job. Some features depend on the platform or the information contained in the source data. A disabled option often means that the currently enabled clouds do not have the required attributes.

This release adds Vivid Reality, which lets you tune lighting and atmosphere to make geometry easier to read or prepare a view for presentation, and Airborne M3C2, which compares bare-earth change between lidar survey groups. Because the comparison works across groups, survey tiles do not need matching boundaries or point densities.

Before You Begin: What PurpleGeo Is For

People who work with places, not just files

PurpleGeo is particularly useful to people who receive or create large spatial datasets and need to make sense of them:

• Surveyors and geomatics teams checking the coverage, geometry, and usefulness of captured data, or giving colleagues a way to explore a survey without handing them an entire specialist processing workflow.
• Civil, geotechnical, and mining engineers examining terrain, rock faces, excavations, embankments, pit walls, and structures. A shaded 3D view or a well-placed section often tells you more than a map alone.
• Construction, building, and plant teams investigating existing conditions before a repair, installation, or modification. The useful result may be a handful of dimensions and a clear section through a crowded area, not an elaborate model of everything in the building.
• Infrastructure and environmental teams reviewing roads, rail, utilities, powerline corridors, forests, waterways, and changes across repeated surveys.

You do not have to be the person who collected the data. In many projects the survey has already been delivered and the immediate problem is simply getting other people to use it.

Start with the geometry

A point cloud is not just a background picture of a site. Each point represents an observed location, sometimes with extra information such as colour, intensity, classification, or return number. Those attributes are useful, but the geometry is the foundation.

That is why Surface is such an important display mode in PurpleGeo. Shading can bring out a rock joint, a pipe bend, a retaining-wall face, or the shape of a ground surface that is difficult to read from RGB colour alone. You are changing the presentation of the measured data, not inventing a new, more accurate survey.

PurpleGeo is built around a fairly direct progression:

1. Open the actual survey data.
2. Find the part of the site that matters.
3. Understand its shape using navigation, lighting, display modes, and filters.
4. Interrogate it with sections, measurements, annotations, or comparison tools.
5. Communicate what you found using saved views, flythroughs, shares, or exported point clouds.

You might do all five, or you might stop after the third because the answer is already obvious.

A few boundaries worth knowing

PurpleGeo makes existing spatial data easier to work with. It does not make a poor survey accurate, register misaligned scans for you, or automatically resolve conflicting coordinate systems. Check the survey's control, units, coverage, and registration before relying on precise measurements or change results.

It is also useful to distinguish viewing and marking up geometry from producing a finished CAD drawing. The current section and annotation tools are valuable working tools, but do not assume they produce a formally drafted, dimensioned drawing or a fabrication-ready deliverable. Likewise, a visual section is not automatically an exported crop of a point cloud.

Local projects can be explored without uploading their survey data to a sharing service. Share Private Link is an explicit upload workflow, and recipients need network access for data that has not been cached.

Your first ten minutes

If you are new to PurpleGeo, try this with a Demo Project before importing your own data:

1. Open a demo and start in Map. Locate a recognizable feature.
2. Switch to Rotate & Inspect and orbit around that feature. Try Surface, then RGB, and move the Surface / RGB crossfade.
3. Return to Map and draw a Cross Section through something interesting. Make the section thinner and thicker; step it backward and forward.
4. Use Annotations to place a line or a point that marks something worth discussing.
5. Save a useful camera position in Saved Views and return to it.

This introduces PurpleGeo's basic working pattern: find a place, change your perspective, ask a question, keep the useful result.