Essentially follow the process found here: http://www.itk.org/Wiki/index.php?title=ParaView/PCL_Plugin/Download_And_Build_Instructions&oldid=47996 However, there are a few modifications, the plugin install will only work with ParaView 3.12 and PCL 1.5.1, so if you don’t have these versions, you will need to install these and even if you do, you might have to install from source in order to change a few cmake settings.

• 1) Install Paraview 3.12
  • You can download the source files at:

    http://www.paraview.org/paraview/resources/software.php Make sure you choose v3.12, and ParaView Source Files Extract the downloaded files to some directory where you’ll be working

    • Example: /home/ParaView-3.12.0
    $cd /home/ParaView-3.12.0 $mkdir build $cd build $ccmake .. OR $cmake-gui Make sure that BUILD_SHARED_LIBS is set to ON Configure and generate files $make

This will take a while - depending on your machine. On the two I built, the first was about 2 hours and the second was about an hour. The executable paraview file will be in /home/ParaView-3.12.0/build/bin

If you add export PATH=/home/ParaView-3.12.0/build/bin/:$PATH to your ~/.bashrc file, then you just need to type “paraview” in the terminal to start the program

• 2) Install PCL 1.5

  • Download source files at http://pointclouds.org/downloads/ Download the “PCL-1.5.1-Source.tar.bz2” $cd home/PCL-1.5.1-Source $mkdir build $cd build $ccmake .. OR $cmake-gui If you have problems with the build it might be that you are missing some components. See following for mandatory libraries in order to build PCL:

    • http://pointclouds.org/downloads/source.html Scroll down to dependencies (mandatory).

    If you install of these dependencies from source, then make sure you reference these when you do ccmake or cmake-gui when building PCL
    • (Example: FLANN_INCLUDE_DIR /home/flann-1.7.1-src/src/cpp, etc.)
    Also, make sure that the VTK_DIR variable is set to the one in Paraview install
    • (Example: VTK_DIR /home/ParaView-3.12.0/build/VTK)
    and finally $make

This took about 50 minutes.

• 3) Install plugin
  • Download source files at:

    http://www.itk.org/Wiki/index.php?title=ParaView/PCL_Plugin/Download_And_Build_Instructions&oldid=47996 $cd /home/PointCloudLibraryPlugin-v1.0 $mkdir build $cd build $ccmake ..

    • change PCL_DIR and ParaView_DIR (and any others, like FLANN dirs)

    $make This took just a few minutes

Then assuming you edited your .bashrc, you can just type paraview in the terminal and ParaView will start. Lastly, go to Tools->Manage Plugins

• Load New find your plug in (Example, found in /home/PointCloudLibraryPlugin-v1.0/build/, file called libvtkPCLFilters.so)

Now you can import point cloud data, and use the PCL algorithms which are found under Filters, Point Cloud Library.