Mesh Cloud Mode

Mesh Cloud scans a space with ARKit’s LiDAR mesh reconstruction and turns it into a point cloud you can walk around on the phone, clean up, and send to TouchDesigner or export as a file. It sits between Point Cloud mode (a live, un-edited stream) and Scene Build (RoomPlan’s clean architectural model) — a capture you finish once, then review and hand off.

Not just TouchDesigner. The finished Mesh Cloud drives Blender (via the TDLiDAR Blender add-on) and Arkestra too — and exports as PLY for any 3D tool:

Blender add-on Arkestra

How it works

While scanning, ARKit builds up a 3D mesh of the room from the LiDAR sensor as you move the phone around. Rather than streaming that raw mesh, the app resamples it into a point cloud: space is divided into a voxel grid, and every occupied voxel becomes one averaged point. Coarser voxels mean fewer, larger-spaced points; finer voxels mean a denser cloud, up to a point cap the app enforces automatically by coarsening the grid until it fits.

Scanning

The live scan screen shows the growing point cloud directly from the AR camera’s point of view as you move. A Scan stage runs continuously; the phone is deliberately conservative about incorporating new mesh data while it’s rotating quickly, since fast turns are the main source of drift in a live mesh scan. Move slowly and give each surface a moment to settle in.

Finish ends the scan and freezes the current cloud, handing off to the review screen.

Review — the free-fly viewer

Once finished, the same view expands into a free-fly 3D viewer you can navigate independently of the phone’s own orientation: an on-screen joystick moves you through the space, a zoom dial and pinch gesture control distance, and drag orbits the camera. This is a proper walkthrough of the capture, not just a locked preview.

An edit mode toggle turns on point cleanup: drag a rectangle over the view to select points (through-selection — it grabs everything under the rectangle regardless of depth), then trash the selection to delete it. Undo and redo cover edit history.

Four buttons handle what happens next:

  • Send streams the current cloud once, over TCP, to TouchDesigner — the same wire format and receiving operator as Point Cloud mode’s tdlidar_pointcloud_tcp, just pointed at Mesh Cloud’s own port (default 9004, independent of Point Cloud mode’s own port setting) so the two modes don’t collide if you use both.
  • Export saves the cloud as a binary PLY file through the system share sheet, for Blender, MeshLab, CloudCompare or any 3D tool.
  • Rescan discards the current cloud and starts a fresh scan.
  • Settings opens the mode’s full settings panel.

Settings

Quantization sets the voxel size in centimetres — lower is denser (and heavier); the app automatically coarsens beyond this if the point cap is hit. Point size scales how large each point renders in the viewer only (cosmetic, not part of the sent/exported data). Move, Look and Zoom speed tune the free-fly navigation feel. Max points caps the cloud size.

A Clean-up section has three live toggles you can flip mid-review to compare the effect immediately: Remove floating points (on by default) drops voxels with no neighbour — pure noise specks; Keep largest piece only discards every fragment except the single largest contiguous piece of the scan; Colour incomplete areas shades well-surrounded points by distance from camera but marks sparse/edge points in warm amber, so you can see at a glance which parts of the scan are solid and which need another pass.

When you’re in the review screen, the settings panel also shows the TouchDesigner section — the target IP and the TCP port Send will use.

Needs

Mesh Cloud requires a LiDAR device with ARKit scene-mesh reconstruction support (the same hardware requirement as LiDAR depth mode).