Volume calculation without deleting vegetation points

Is there a way to calculate volumes without deleting the vegetation points? I went through the process of manually classifying the points and attempted to create a new DSM. I wish there was a way to select which classes were included. Additionally, I wish there was a way to run volumes by class, or a toggle to exclude certain classes without having to delete them entirely. 

Do you have an example of such a use case? For what purpose do you keep the vegetation in the model? More background on the desired application will help us put some context around this suggestion. 

One workaround that might be applicable is to measure two volumes. One with the area of interest and one only of the vegetation. Then subtract one to the other to get the volume of interest. 

I second the bit about wishing there was a way to turn classes of points off when calculating volumes. I’ve got some vegetation on top of some soil stockpiles that have been sitting around for a long time, and I would like to calculate the cut volume. I classified them as “high vegetation” and tried turning off that class while drawing my volumes, but it still acts like the vegetation points are visible and includes them in the volume calcs, which is throwing off the numbers. 

My understanding is that the volumes are calculated using the DSM, but this means I have to classify what should be “high vegetation” points as “Disabled” and re-run step 3. I will do this for now and keep two separate folders saved for with or without vegetation, but it would be nice to be able to do this without re-running step 3. This would be a huge pain for a really big project.

Hi Nathan,

As you have found out, Pix4Dmapper generate the DSM using all point classes except the “Disabled” one and as you mention volume are calculated based on the DSM.
That’s why if your vegetation is not assigned to the class “Disabled”, it will be taken into account for volume calculation.
At the moment, I cannot recommend you anything else than your workflow.
Your request has been suggested to our developers. 

Best

I’ll second this. My use case is getting a functional surface into civil 3D. All the trees in the area cause the file to be to large and crash the software. Having to manually select all the points to disable is a big time suck. If I could just disable entire point cloud classification layers would reduce my workflow time significantly.

Hi @mtarkington,

I might have happened that I did not understand your use case. But, what about having a point cloud with a desired category? You can run the classification and export the point cloud having only the class you want.
image
Let me know in case I missed the point :wink: