EDL vs. ShadeVis/PCV

[GISdba]

Hi

I am new to the awesome CloudCompare and relatively new in dealing with LAS data and pointclouds. My question is what is the difference between the EDL shader and the ShadeVis plugin? When to use each one? Is there a usecase or scenario that is suitable for a method than the other?

Thank you in advanced

[daniel]

So the EDL shader is really a real time rendering shader. It's only for visualization. Also, from a technical perspective, it only uses the 2.5D depth map corresponding to what's currently displayed on the screen.

While ShadeVis is a real computation plugin, that will compute a more refined 'illuminance' scalar field on all the points of the cloud (or vertices of a mesh). This scalar field can then be exported, the color map changed, etc. It's a real 3D process, with customizable light orientation also.

[GISdba]

Thank you Daniel for the clarification. :)