What a point cloud is
A point cloud is a collection of points in 3D space. Each point is an X, Y, Z coordinate marking one position inside or on the surface of an object. Stack thousands or millions of them together and a recognisable shape appears, rendered as a dense spray of dots rather than a solid surface.
At LaserTools a point cloud has exactly one purpose: subsurface laser engraving (SSLE), the process that suspends a 3D image inside a glass crystal. These points carry no colour. Tone and contrast come entirely from point density — pack the points tightly and that region reads as bright; spread them out and it reads as shadow. Your eye blends the varying dot density into a greyscale image floating in the crystal.
How LaserTools creates them
Every LaserTools point cloud is produced by Crystal Studio. It takes in almost any 3D file and converts it into the dense, engraving-ready cloud an SSLE machine runs. It is also a layout workspace built for composition: you can position and scale multiple meshes and add text, arranging everything exactly where you want it inside the 3D volume of the crystal so the finished engraving comes out perfectly placed rather than left to chance.
The 3D file can come from anywhere. Bring your own STL, GLB, or PLY model, or make one from a picture: Mesh Studio turns a single photo into a 3D mesh, and that mesh drops straight into Crystal Studio. You can also laser-scan a physical object, export the scan as a 3D file, import it into Crystal Studio, and have it engraved — the same pipeline, just starting from a scan instead of a photo.
Putting a flat image in a crystal
Because a point cloud only encodes 3D shape, a flat photo, logo, or drawing cannot be engraved directly — there is no depth for the laser to follow. You first convert the image into a 3D file.
Mesh Studio does exactly that, turning a 2D image into a mesh (the 2D-mesh conversion, 50 credits). The resulting mesh goes straight into Crystal Studio to become your point cloud. Converting between 3D file formats — STL, GLB, and PLY — is free in the browser with the LaserTools converters.
Why subsurface laser engraving needs them
SSLE produces 3D portraits and objects suspended inside a glass crystal. The engraver focuses a laser to exact 3D coordinates inside the blank and creates one tiny fracture per point. Each point in the file becomes one dot in the crystal, and together those dots form the image. Without a point cloud there is nothing to engrave — which is precisely the file Crystal Studio exports.
This is where density does the work colour normally would. Closely packed points engrave as bright, solid areas; sparse points read as shadow, so a colourless cloud still reproduces a full greyscale image. Most crystal jobs sit between fifty thousand and a million points: more points means finer tone and more machine time, and there is a sweet spot for any given crystal size and laser resolution.
The file formats that matter
Crystal Studio accepts almost any common 3D file, but three formats cover nearly every job. STL is the ubiquitous CAD and 3D-printing format — pure geometry with no colour, which suits SSLE perfectly since colour is ignored anyway. GLB is the modern, compact 3D format (binary glTF) that packs a model into a single file, ideal for assets coming out of 3D apps and model libraries. PLY is the most flexible of the three: it can store either a mesh or raw points, so it is the natural shape of a finished point cloud and the format Crystal Studio works with most directly.
If a model arrives in the wrong one, the LaserTools converters move between STL, GLB, and PLY in the browser for free.
Where the point cloud goes next
LaserTools sits at the generation end of the pipeline: Mesh Studio turns a photo into a 3D mesh, and Crystal Studio turns a 3D file into the point cloud. You can inspect any cloud in the browser first with the point cloud viewer.
Once it is exported, the point cloud feeds whatever software drives your engraver — load it into xTool Studio, or any other package your SSLE machine uses, and run the job. Crystal Studio can also skip that step for some machines and write the whole job directly, including an xTool (.xs) file; those formats are marked highly experimental, so test one on scrap before trusting it with a finished blank. If you need to clean up or reposition a model before engraving, do that in your usual 3D editor and re-import the file into Crystal Studio.