We are happy to announce a new pipeline for publishing point clouds on Sketchfab. The point cloud engine NUBIGON now features a Sketchfab integration that allows users to manage point clouds and upload them directly to Sketchfab.
NUBIGON is a desktop-based reality capture software for advanced point cloud visualization and 3D modeling. Rendering point clouds of any size at full resolution in real-time, it enables users to produce immersive virtual environments and quickly extract as-built models. Users can enrich point clouds with lights, shadows, annotations, other mesh models, and CAD drawings for demonstration purposes or interactively model in the point clouds with real-time validation.
What’s New?
With the latest release of NUBIGON, it is now possible to decimate point clouds to a target size and directly upload them to Sketchfab. Users can complement enriched point cloud visualizations in live demos, camera animations, and orthophotos with online viewing options provided by Sketchfab.
Take a look at the Sketchfab Help Center article for a step-by-step guide on how to upload point clouds to Sketchfab using NUBIGON.
Recreating the Science Museum’s Shipping Gallery
As part of a collaboration between the Science Museum in London, NUBIGON, and Sketchfab, we have explored various ways of utilizing point clouds for visualization purposes. The data source was a laser scan of the Shipping Gallery, commissioned by the Science Museum and conducted by ScanLab before the Gallery closed in 2012. This digital documentation produced 700 GB of data, which corresponds to about 8.2 billion points.
In order to take full advantage of this large and rich, but hard to handle data, we have first processed the data in NUBIGON. The camera animation below captures the full point cloud dataset as visualized in NUBIGON.
We have then uploaded downsampled versions of the entire point cloud to Sketchfab. To further highlight select objects, we have saved them as separate point cloud files and uploaded them. Below you can find these Sketchfab point clouds ready for online viewing and dissemination.
Shipping Gallery by Science Museum Group on Sketchfab
Explore more point clouds uploaded via NUBIGON in this collection and to learn more about NUBIGON, visit their website.
Explore more models from the Science Museum on their Sketchfab profile.




