Collage Web is a cloud computing application. Its cloud infrastructure stores and delivers data to Web browsers and desktop applications like Collage Office.
Both the cloud storage and the data streaming have a cost that is reflected on the license fees. It is, therefore, important for users to keep these costs under control.
Point clouds and panoramas uploaded from Collage Office consume storage space in the cloud infrastructure. The data management objects, like layers and projects, as well as the extracted features, do not count as storage.
A first technique to reduce the storage is to reduce the area of the data exported from Collage Office.
For point clouds, the Cloud selection tools allow the user to select the active area in the Map or 3D views.
For IP-S panoramas, a segment of the trajectory can be selected by using the Select tool in the Tools tab:
The publication of point cloud and panorama data to Collage Web will automatically be limited to the selected area (for point clouds) and trajectory segments (for panoramas).
To reduce the storage and streaming consumed, the user may publish point clouds with reduced density. The appropriate density will depend on the target application: feature extraction, cross section extraction, visual inspection, etc.
Control the density when creating the Cloud
A basic technique to control the point cloud density is to use this parameter when creating the Cloud object. Refer to the "Adjustment of density" section in "Creating clouds and adjustments", in the Collage Office manual.
In addition, Collage Office has Cloud processing options to selectively reduce the point resolution. Check Collage Office documentation about how to use these methods.
For instance, see the results of resampling this original dataset with a couple of different techniques:
Remove redundant points (feature sensitive resampling)
Topographic resampling
If the storage is reduced, the streaming will also be reduced.
In addition, there is a "Level of detail" setting which controls the density of points displayed in the 3D View. The higher this value is, the nicer the point cloud would look, but also more streaming will be consumed to bring higher detail data to the browser.
Therefore, it is recommended to keep this level of detail it as low as possible, and only increase it when you really need to see the full detail of the point clouds, or capture nice images.
This setting is independent for each project.
All modern Web browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari) keep a cache of data to be reused when the user requests them again. The use of this cache reduces the amount of streaming consumed by Collage Web.
Google Chrome
The recommended method to control the cache size is this:
--disk-cache-size=10000000 in the field, modifying the number after size= so that it represents the space that you would like to devote to the Google Chrome disk cache in bytes.
Mozilla Firefox
To change the cache size in Firefox:
Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari
These browsers increase the cache size automatically as long as there is free disk space. While this is good to reduce streaming, it also may slow down the application and consume a lot of disk space, so a cache cleaning will be needed at some point.