Disable snapping to point cloud points

SzecsodiBenjamin · ‎2025-05-22

Unfortunately, the fact that ArchiCAD wants to fit the elements to each point really slows down and hinders accurate, nicely edited work.
It would be nice to have a simple solution that would enable the fitting to the points of the point cloud to be turned on and off.

The switched off points would allow for faster and more accurate editing.

Thanks in advance, it would be a great help.

pejotunb · ‎2025-05-29

This can be achieved by placing the cloud in a design option?

SzecsodiBenjamin · ‎2025-05-29

Placing the point cloud on a design option only helps in the sense that it allows us to easily toggle its visibility on and off, and that works fine for now. However, a better solution would be if the point cloud remained visible, but during editing or model building, the tool wouldn't snap to every single point of the cloud. Unfortunately, this currently makes our work more difficult, as it’s hard to perform “idealized” or “rounded” editing.

pejotunb · ‎2025-05-29

Hmm, I was thinking the possibility to disable selection of other than elements in the active design option also disables snapping, but maybe I'm misremembering.

Mike96 · ‎2025-08-09

I greatly second this wish. Snapping to point clouds in my top 1 Archicad annoyance. It's counter-logical and it may even hinder the performance (which is very bad for point clouds).

There should be some real improvement done to point clouds, like: disable snapping, set the size on the screen (instead of sticking to 2x2 px), display point intensity values so we don't have to convert it to RGB every frickin time, set color schemes for intensity, improve performance. Shall I continue?

Francois Swanepoel

Hi @SzecsodiBenjamin every project we work on has point clouds and I never though I don't want the cursor to snap to the point cloud,

I quickly tested pejotunb's suggestion, but when the point cloud is set in a Design Option we can make the point cloud visible and only turn editing of the point cloud Design Option off, but it still the cursor snaps snaps to the point cloud points.

Then reading your answer to further reply to pejotunb's suggestion, I understand more what you mean.

I agree, being able to still see the point cloud but simply disabling / enabling the cursor snapping on the fly with a single click, will improve working in point clouds.

We have to constantly switch off the point cloud layer to (1) see or (2) do something in the actual model. This means every time we do this, we have to wait quite a long time for the point cloud to load back on screen every time we switch the layer back on. Every time we have to wait, literally adds up to hours lost just waiting

I also agree with @Mike96's list of improvements for Archicad's point cloud tools. It has been unchanged for several versions and point clouds are used on more & more projects every year by more designers everywhere. And improve performance is on top of that list!!? Just this one improvement will exponentially impact our ability to deliver projects better & with time savings also deliver better projects. It's that simple.

I do not understand why Archicad is not making more use of the GPU or using it very little (if any) for loading & rendering point clouds in 2D & 3D drawings views on screen. Info by Graphisoft states that "ArchiCAD uses the GPU for displaying and navigating project models, leveraging hardware acceleration for both 2D and 3D windows to ensure smooth performance. While the CPU handles much of the project data generation, the GPU is crucial for drawing and displaying this information on screen, especially in the 3D window. " but I don't see that at all.

But I have looked into this numerous times and it show Archicad's processing of the point clouds in particular, is mainly done through the CPU.

We can see this by simply watching the CPU & GPU activity live in Task Manager when we switch point cloud layers on, and when navigating any 2D & 3D view with the point clouds switched on.

I am not a programmer, but I can see that more use of the GPU will make Archicad more efficient in processing point cloud data.