Hello everyone, I’m trying to render a small animation, but every frame comes out completely blank. I have a camera, some camera animation, and lighting in the scene, so I’m not sure what I’m missing or what could be causing it.
Here’s the blend file:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1y9UqDAkMDUetZ5ivhbDqDWrbgXs_Ppvv?dmr=1&ec=wgc-drive-hero-goto
And screenshot of the blank render:
Welcome!
This is happening because your object is composed entirely of vertices, which don’t render unless they are connected into faces.
Is this intended to be a point cloud? If it is, there is a little manipulation to make it actually render as such. You need to select the object, right click → convert to → point cloud.
Once that is done, you can enter edit mode on the object and use the shrink/fatten tool (shortcut alt+s) to change the size of the points if needed.
Is it possible to apply the point-cloud conversion across all frames in the sequence? When I convert a single frame to a point cloud, it works, but it also removes the other animation frames.
I’m using the Stop-motion-OBJ add-on (https://github.com/neverhood311/Stop-motion-OBJ
) to import a sequence of splat PLY files. My goal is to get a render similar to SuperSplat with flexibility of blender, which also preserves the color information from the PLY files. Is there a way to keep or recover the per-point color data when converting to a point cloud?
Maybe you could try converting using geometry nodes instead of doing it manually. Then, it will be a setup that’s applied to the object after the fact, so I imagine it could preserve the frames. I can’t test it, as it appears your upload doesn’t have the animation.
Your model seems to have imported without color. If there was, it would show up as a color attribute on the mesh if my info is correct.
Maybe the importer you used can’t do it? Or maybe there is an option that wasn’t checked? It doesn’t look like an addon that was designed for point clouds, but see if there is a vertex color or vertex attribute setting.
From what I have seen, Blender’s own ply importer seems like it can import the color, but I don’t think it can import a sequence. If it fails too, I have seen that there is a ply importing addon that can apparently handle edge cases, but I also don’t see any mention of sequences.
You seem to just have a very rare idea here that basically no one is trying to do. Maybe the only way to have both color and animation would be to import all the frames as separate objects, then find some way to swap them each frame.
Thanks a lot for your help! Adding Geometry Nodes fixed the issue.
It looks like the importer is the real problem. I also tried Blender’s built-in importer on a single frame and it failed to read the colors, so I may need to use that addon you mentioned. From what I can see, the frame-swapping idea you suggested is exactly what the importer is already doing. All the PLY files are placed in a collection, and when you play the animation the point cloud switches to the next mesh each frame.
4D Gaussian Splatting is still very new. I saw a demonstration of it on 4DV.ai and wanted to try it out in blender because the results looked interesting.
The results aren’t perfect, but it’s a start
