Seems you guys missed an entire market sector, couple guys just released a point cloud importer for max.
For some reason (well that Frost Point Cloud thing Bobo did) I thought Krakatoa already had support for this.
So that bears the question why does Krakatoa not support .pcl or whatever the point cloud standard file format is? or some conversion utility, ect?
You got to be kidding with the “missed” part. We are selling FROST to people doing LIDAR processing all the time.
Krakatoa MX Evaluation version does the loading, combining, culling and post-processing for free.
And FROST includes conversion for PTS, PTX and XYZ which are the typical LIDAR file formats (we can add more formats as people ask for them).
Of course, I have not used the new tool and don’t know how it compares to ours. I think the main difference is that it provides point rendering in mental ray and Scanline. It does not mesh though, so FROST has the advantage there.
Lol, no offense intended Bobo, I am unfamiliar that sector. Thats why i am asking 
I just wondered why someone would spend the time and money to write a tool and charge soo much for it when I thought thinkbox tools did all and 10x more for, by comparison, much less in cost.
we should probably target that sector directly
cb
Well it is pretty much an $800+ importer, a single use tool.
According to them the next closest competing product costs quote “thousands of dollars more”. I wanted to reply to some remarks they had made but found myself not qualified to respond and ask about some comparisons. I consider myself fairly well versed with all of your products that I use, until I saw that, and realized a moderately big gap in my knowledge. 
Out of curiosity why aren’t those formats available via PRT Loader? I can see that you may want to surface them in Frost but seems you might simply want to point/voxel render them as well? Which is why I actually asked here.
In the case of both PTS and PTX, we felt that reading these files was too slow. So just like in the competing product discussed here, we convert them to a PRT file first. We went with a stand-alone converter which FROST calls when you pick such a file. We could drop the same converter into the Krakatoa MX install and make the PRT Loader do the same (this will be even easier since the PRT Loader’s UI is scripted). Anyone could download the FROST demo and run the converter as needed, we just have to advertise this better, as CB mentioned.
Is it just an importer? If so, that’s pretty lame.
What people using point cloud data need is tools for filtering, fitting, segmenting, object recognition, etc.
It is not my job to defend their product, but no, it isn’t just an importer. It has features for modeling, segmenting and rendering.
I assume they got mad at Autodesk for purchasing AliceLabs and tried to write something similar to fill the void. 
Sorry “importer” was not the proper term, it is a loader.
Seems like a win from my point of view. You get the benefit of PRT Loader and the full power of Magma.