As the author of the import-ply-as-verts addon, I received the following email from Katie Jarvis at the University of Rochester’s Triforce Institute:
“My name is Katie, I’m a current college student who has been using your import-ply-as-verts addon for the past year or so as part of the research that I do with a physics team I’m working on that focuses on particle simulation. I saw that Blender incorporated a lot of your changes into the most recent 4.0 update which is super cool but I noticed that they still don’t have an option for custom attributes that aren’t just location and color. … This summer and some of last summer, I made some personal edits to your python code that allowed for reading of the ply header in order to create custom named attributes. … I was wondering if you might be interested to take a look and possibly incorporate some of the changes onto your main branch? I think it could be really useful for some people. … Finally, if it helps at all for the video you’re making, here is the link to my lab’s page: https://hajim.rochester.edu/me/sites/sefkow/index.html . (Basically, my university has a state of the art laser which is currently being used for nuclear research. My team is working with the Laser Lab to write code that can accurately simulate physics at similar conditions. And it’s going to be all open source and free to use so that other universities can do similar nuclear research without needing to have a massive building-sized laser at hand). I came in my freshman year with basically zero coding knowledge and a lot of experience in CAD modeling. I decided that I was going to focus on taking the outputs from the team’s simulations and make them easier to understand for people without physics or C.S. degrees by rendering them as points in 3D space. Through that path, I finally came across Blender and then your addon.”
As the Python PLY modules are being deprecated in 4.0, I had assumed they were obsolete. However, Ms. Jarvis makes the excellent point that Python is FAR easier than C++ to modify for special purposes. Her improvements to the code are significant and will be merged into the main branch of the addon. Furthermore, I feel the Python codebase is still relevant if not preferred among certain academic circles due to that very flexibility.
Therefore, I’ll be making more changes to the addon (making it a proper addon is at the top of the list!) in the coming months. Import-ply-as-verts will remain an actively maintained repo, and we now have a new support site at theplyguy.xyz.
Dev Update video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ5ANRp9WZw&t=18s