Faster and preferable way of adding PCV Tiles instance to scene is to use helper operator from Add menu: 3d Viewport header → Add or Shift+A anywhere in viewport and choose PCV: Tiles menu item. File browser will open, navigate to directory with tiles (dataset split to a grid of LAS/LAZ/E57 files), set options if needed (defaults will be set from preferences), and click Add PCV: Tiles button. Correct files will be selected from directory, tiles list populated and tiles drawn in viewport.

When source directory is set and contents scanned for files, tile list is populated. Each row represent one file. To rescan directory for files, click at the end of directory row.

means tile is not loaded, indicates that tile linked file has been loaded. is selection status, marks selected tile. is tile show status, if enabled, tile contents will be drawn in viewport, if not only preview data or lowest LOD level will be used. means tile is enabled, means tile is disabled and will not be loaded and processed.

Under list, there are two selection modal operators, Pointer select and Box select , deselect operator and menu with utility operators.

If you select list item directly clicking it so it is highlighted, item is considered selected and active, if you click its button, it is considered selected. It makes difference in a few utility operators.

Draw and Erase are main tile set controls, one will start processing, other will stop it. Frame TileSet will move viewport camera to frame all tiles, set viewport clip start and end to preferable range and will adjust LOD Distance of tile set according to overall dimensions.

Collection of utility operators working with tile list. Some can be run at runtime when tile set is loaded, some cannot.

First section contains some more framing operators. Second selection manipulation and select by tile status flags. Third section will set flags on selected tiles. Fourth section operators remove tile list items by selection or flags. Fifth exports (copies) tile files to a another directory. And last will open source directory in system file browser.

Tile set main settings, these have direct influence on performance.

Type switches between Sequential, Parallel and Threaded. Sequential loads files in Blender Main thread, this is option for safety and stability, it is still possible to use Blender while files are loading, but interface will be laggy until visible tiles files finish loading. Parallel will load and process files in parallel, Blender interface will be locked until all is finished, but it is the fastest way to load data. Threaded will load multiple files in other threads, interface interaction will be much smoother, files will be all loaded sooner, but Blender may become unstable, it is uncertain if you will run into problems or not. Blender is not built to be thread safe, see here for more info from Blender documentation or Troubleshooting section. The best is to leave at Sequential for first load, then if dataset fits fully in system memory when loaded, switch to Parallel so next time when blend file is opened all is loaded sooner. But you may also find that Threaded in your use case is perfectly stable.

Pause and Resume will pause or resume loading of new tile files, tiles that already started loading will finish first.

LOD enables generating of Level Of Detail levels upon loading, if disabled, only a preview level is generated at 1% of points to be used while navigating or when tile Show flag is disabled. LOD Distance controls how levels are distributed. Imagine line at the center of 3D viewport starting at camera location, pointing in camera direction of LOD Distance length, divided in LOD Levels segments with level number assigned starting at LOD Levels down to zero at far end. If tile is in camera view and bounding box center falls into any segment, til will draw assigned level, if it is further that that, zero level is used.

Unload Hidden can help managing memory by unloading tiles that are not in view, unloading can happen after some time is elapsed or immediately, depends on Preferences settings. But unless you running out of system memory (RAM) better to leave disabled.

Optimize Data controls what is loaded from source files, see next section.

Preset menu in panel header will save all settings in all subpanels into a preset.

Controls what is loaded from source files, if disabled, all available is loaded, but this will have serious impact on system memory usage. For example on screenshot there are settings that will load all points, but only keep colors and intensity scalar. Other data are not stored and point coordinates will be stored as single precision floats.

• Max Points - limit maximum number of points loaded, in millions
• Keep Double Precision - keep point positions in float64 as loaded from files, for drawing on screen, single precision - float32 is used, there is not need to keep double precision in memory, takes twice as much space
• Keep Colors - disable if dataset has no colors or colors are stored, but all zeros
• Keep Normals - it is very probable your dataset has no normals anyway, and so far normals are not used for anything yet
• Keep Scalars - disable to not store scalar values at all, enable to keep all or select fields if its name matches any of comma separated strings in field next to it

Define and store tile set states. State includes tile status and selection flags and you can quickly switch between stored states. Ideal for datasets that cannot fit into memory, or to improve performance of large dataset if you need to focus to just one section of it. Using selection modal tools and select tiles and set flags on them as needed, click to store state. will update already stored state with current.

To switch between stored states, click button, means current state of tiles is identical to stored state.

States list menu with several options

• Apply Selected State - same function as button
• Check State Identity - enable or disable identity indication with and , disable if ui is not as responsive as it should be
• Check Identity Including Selection - enable or disable selection comparison
• Apply Selection From State - restore selection flag on tiles when restoring state or not
• Clear Stored States - remove all stored

TileSet Type: Sequential

• Load Queue - Controls how many tiles at most are loaded at the same time, if set to zero, all tiles are loaded without a break, but interface will be locked until everything is loaded

TileSet Type: Parallel

• CPU Count - Controls how many CPU cores are utilized during loading, leave at zero for maxmimum, set to lower value to leave some cores for other tasks (not exactly per core). If set to higher value than system offers, maximum is used
• Load Everything On Draw - Load all enabled tiles even those not in view, disabled when Unload Hidden is enabled

TileSet Type: Threaded

• Use Multithreading - Start multiple background threads to load files concurrently, disable to use one background thread to load one file at a time. While you will get tiles loaded faster, Blender interface will be less responsive because more work need to be done in Main thread where Blender runs (e.g. passing data to gpu). It has positive effect only when individual tiles have mostly higher point count, 500k and more. Please note, this is not multithreading as in multiprocessing, multiple threads are started, but python is processing only one thread at a time, some operations will happen concurrently, like disk I/O, but point processing will not. Some deeper changes need to be made to Blender first to support multiprocessing so even data can be processed in parallel.
• Threads - How many threads will be running when Multithreading is enabled, value 0 will use number of logical CPUs

TileSet Type: Any

Custom Shift/Scale lets you set specific values for shift and scale, Reset will remove custom values and will use automatic. If this is used, loaded tileset will be reloaded.

LOD Level Percentages lets you change distribution of points in levels for current LOD Levels number.

• - Set linear distribution
• - Set cubic distribution
• - Set exponential distribution
• - Validate percentages, i.e. make sure they are sorted in correct order, this can shuffle your values
• - Reset to default (cubic)

Preview Count - Force number of points for preview level, lowest LOD level if LOD is enabled, or for preview data

GPU Queue - Because "uploading" of data to GPU can happen only in Blender main thread, to minimize locking of interface, only a portion of tiles are "uploaded" at a time, this controls how many tiles are "uploaded" at once

If Memory Limit is reached, loading of new files is paused and message displayed in main panel and Stats. It checks total system memory minus total free memory, not just memory used by Tiles itself.