I did some users mistakes like I didnāt noticed that I have to select vertices that I want to skin (or at first experiments I couldnāt run the script because of my old Python -console messages are not from my world
Point Cloud comes from low-res video and also glitters are not the right solution for tracking points (at that moment I couldnāt find nothing better that can do this job (by the way I was thinking about black spray that can do small dots -do you know about some?) thatās why the input cloud is more messy that can be
ok, I have one, that is not directly to ypur script, but before I will entry new post (because I cant find it on a net) - some normals are out and some in. and Iām not able to by Ctrl+N switch to one direction. Do you know something about this?
Or is there option to select faces by normal direction only?
Thanks
Try switching between vertex, edge, face mode and press Shift + G, u can also use Ctrl+V, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+F for vertex/edge/face specials.
Using the paint smooth brush can also helps.
Thank you for sharing your cool approach and results, Vklidu. I really love to see how the script is used and what should be improved.
The script is not perfect and if the point cloud is noisy, the normals get unexpected directions. All that I know is Ctrl+N and when it doesnāt work, I have to select the faces that have the opposite direction with looking at the color of the surface of the solid object closely and flip them with W, 0 in Edit mode.
Maybe there is something that I can do more with the script to solve such a problem with normal, for example, by checking the direction of each normal during the script skinning.
@Hans: it was a first test. it wasnāt what I really wanted to get. So maybe in next try But your script got a great job thanks again.
Select faces manually itās impossible. It looks that problem is messy connected faces (see screen). When I tried to separate a part and clean it, Ctrl+N worked well.
first of all I want to say thank you. Really nice script ! I think that if youāre able to rewrite main algorithm in C/C++ (building small crossplatform C/C++ library), the script will rock even more, since it should work 10-20 times faster. This would be very positive major improvement the script is needed at the moment.
For personal use I found a simple solution to fasten execution by removing nearest vertexes. It can be done using Remove Doubles and setting up Limit parameter in Blender. If thereās no need for fine details, the number of vertexes in a point cloud can be decreased and your script will work much faster. For example, Iāve got a 130K vertex point cloud and carefully removed 95% of points by Remove doubles tool. The result is still really great. The calculation time is now ~5-10 minutes depending on settings (instead of hours). Sure this tecnique canāt be used for precise skinning
I agree with you. One of the big problems that the script has now is the speed. OK, I understand the demand of the throughput speed performance for the script.
When I tried to skin large point cloud years ago, it took 6.7 minutes for 131K vertices of well-lined-up point cloud and 13.5 minutes for 65K vertices of noisy one. I think in average it takes 10-20 minutes for 100K vertices with the current script that is written in python. In your case, 130K vertices are removed by 95% and it takes 5-10 minutes for 6.5K vertices, correct? It sounds a bit slow from my experience. It should be 1-2 minutes if itās 6.5K vertices. Does your point cloud have a lot of noise or ununiform distribution? Tweaking the parameters more appropriately might get it faster. I could find good parameters if itās ok to give me one of your point cloud.
In addition of rewriting in C/C++, Iām wondering if I can also use some of parallel libraries to get faster. It seems not to be quite simple to do skinning in a concurrent way, but itās worth taking a try.
However Iām almost of all fully occupied with work at least weekday recent years. Rewriting in C/C++ would be a very big change for the script with a lot of work. When I get some longer holidays in the future, I want to do the major improvement.
The script can skin vertices and create a mesh if you have vertices in Object. Iām not sure if your particle simulation has vertices as result, but if it has, you will get a mesh of smoke.
Hi, is there a new version of the script for 2.5? I wasnt able to run v0.14.
First I tried to run it in the text editor, but it didnt work. An error message appears.
Afterwards installed it in User Preferences - Addons, but I couldnt find it in the list.
Would it be possibe to run it? It lookls really great, exactly what I need to skin a terrain.
The script is only for Blender 2.49 or old.
I have been thinking that itās better to update it for Blender 2.5x. But I donāt have enough time now.
Ok, I understand your demand. I will try to see what parts need to be updated in the codes.
next year i will start a survey proj of old buildings with laser scanner, so i was hoping to find a script to visualize the pointcloud data with blenderā¦
I am not a programmer unfortunatelyā¦ probably it is difficult to rewirte / update the script?!
I donāt have enough time to complete rewriting. Small parts of the script code have been updated to Blender 2.6x and been tested successfully, but a lot of parts are still remaining so far.
Maybe Iām going to start again rewriting this holiday as much as I can.
When Iāve got something that works or Iāve made somewhat progress, I will let you know it on this thread.
script works great 
