2. Read the Data in the Workbench

The main areas

The centre is the data viewport. Around it you will find:

• Top controls: project name, camera modes, display modes, and project actions.
• Layer hierarchy: the project's clouds and other objects, arranged in groups.
• Inspector/tool panels: settings and actions such as Display Settings, Filters, Annotations, Saved Views, and Export.
• View aids: coordinate readout, scale bar, legends, and a minimap where available.

Expand or collapse the side panels when you need more space. The useful distinction is: the hierarchy chooses what you are working on; the panels choose what you want to do with it.

You can explore a project without selecting anything in the hierarchy. Export uses the selected layers, so it is worth noticing the difference between visible, enabled, and selected data.

Select and organize layers

Select rows in the hierarchy to choose the clouds or groups used by operations such as export and change detection.

Click a row to select it. Ctrl-click (or Command-click on macOS) toggles additional rows into or out of the selection; Shift-click selects a contiguous range. Double-click a row to rename it.

Use the hierarchy's visibility controls to switch layers on and off. Groups make larger projects easier to manage. A mutually exclusive group shows one child at a time, useful for comparing alternative scans; press [ and ] to cycle through its siblings.

When is that useful? Imagine two terrestrial scans of a plant room taken before and after equipment was removed. You may want to flip between the two to understand what has changed without displaying both dense clouds on top of one another. Or you might group a site by capture date, building, survey contractor, or sensor type.

The hierarchy also offers New Layer Group, Duplicate, and Delete Layer. Runtime duplicates are working copies for experimentation, not independent copies of the original source file. Do not rely on them as permanent deliverables.

Hierarchy selection is for choosing and organizing layers, including which clouds to export. Lasso-based Selection analysis and statistics are not currently available.

Choose a display mode for the question

Camera mode controls how you move. Display mode controls how the same data is presented. Changing a display mode does not change the underlying survey coordinates.

Tabs are unavailable when no enabled cloud can show the mode. Not every source file contains RGB, classification, return information, or change values.

Surface and RGB: shape first, identification second

A colourized scan can be visually convincing while making the geometry harder to read. A pipe and the wall behind it may be similar colours. Bright sunlight and deep shadows in photographic colour can hide subtle changes in shape. Conversely, uncoloured laser data can contain excellent geometry.

In Display Settings, the Surface / RGB crossfade moves from lit surface shading, through lit source colours, to unlit source colours. Try moving it back and forth while inspecting the same feature. It is often easier to understand a feature in Surface and identify it in RGB.

You can also adjust point size, lighting, and ambient occlusion. Those are tools for reading the data: make the geometry legible, but remember that shading does not turn sparse samples into extra measurements or a verified continuous solid.

Ramps, classes, and returns: inspect the information behind the picture

For Elevation, Slope, Intensity, Classes, Returns, and Change, pay attention to the legend and any relevant range controls. A colour is meaningful only in the context of its mode and scale. The same shade can mean an elevation in one view and a change distance in another.

For example, an airborne LiDAR survey may be more informative with Classes than RGB when you want to see the ground through a forested slope. Returns can help you understand the structure of a canopy. On an exposed rock face, Surface or Slope may be the clearer starting point. No single mode is “best” for all surveys.

Filter without losing sight of what you filtered

Filters restrict which points are displayed, including supported class and return categories. They are useful for isolating ground, vegetation, or another class, but they can also make a healthy dataset look mysteriously incomplete.

If an area seems to have vanished, check WARNING! Active Filters. Show Checkered can distinguish layers that cannot answer the current filters from layers that were deliberately filtered out.

A good habit when something looks strange is to return briefly to an unfiltered view. It helps separate a real gap in the captured data from a display choice.

Shape the 3D presentation with Vivid Reality

Display Settings helps you read the data; Look helps you present it. Vivid Reality controls the lighting, fog, background, and camera finish in the 3D view. It changes the presentation, not which points are shown or what their values mean.

Choose a starting look from the list:

Studio is a useful starting point because a fixed sun can leave the side of a site you are looking at in shadow. Its light follows your view, keeping the geometry legible as you move. Looks with fixed sunlight retain soft fill light so shadowed areas do not disappear.

Adjust Key Light and Fill Light for the main and secondary light; Follows determines whether the main light follows the camera or stays fixed. Headlamp travels with the camera, while Add Light at View Centre places a light in front of the middle of the view. Use Fog to add distance haze, Background to change the sky or colour, and Camera settings for exposure, contrast, colour, vignette, and glow.

Map and Cross Section remain plain reading views: map relief keeps its conventional northwest lighting, and neither view uses the 3D look's camera finish. For colour values that need to match the legend precisely, read them in Map or Cross Section. Look changes are temporary and return to their defaults when you reopen the project.

Detail and responsiveness

PurpleGeo is designed to let you work with large datasets interactively, rather than making you wait for every point to be drawn before moving. To keep navigation responsive, lower interaction quality or detail if needed. Still-view detail is controlled separately, so a cloud may sharpen once the camera stops.

This has a practical consequence: do not make a fine-detail judgment while the view is still refining. Let local rendering or streaming settle, zoom to the right scale, and then inspect or measure.