Colored vertices in the viewport?

[Blended_Blue]

I have generated some .ply point cloud data and have imported into Blender. The .ply files have color information associated with each vertex but no faces information. When I import into blender I only see vertexes but the colors are not shown.

Is it possible to render vertices as individually colored points/dots in any way? I do not need to render these points but I do require seeing colors in the viewport for reference.

I tried replacing each vertex with a simple quad but there are more than 900000 vertices and took far too long to complete.

I can’t use 3rd party plugins for this either so I was hoping Blender could offer some way to allow drawing colored points in the viewport?

Thanks!!

[Atair]

unfortunately not yet, but they already work on native point support (as far as i know)
In the meantime an option might be this:

Point Cloud Visualizer

[pcv] Display, edit, filter, render, convert, generate and export colored point cloud PLY files. [header-500px] Available at Blender Market Key Features: Display hundreds of millions of colored points in 3d viewport, limited only by system and gpu memory. Any Blender object can be used as container for points, points are not part of Blender data (until converted to) for maximal performance. Supported file formats - read: PLY, LAS/LAZ, E57, PCD, any text based file format such as PTS, XYZ, TXT,…

[Blended_Blue]

Thanks, I saw that addon but the guy wants $50 for it and I feel Blender should be totally capable of rendering colored dots.

I saw this project on github where they are able to create particles and use the particle index to apply individual colors: https://github.com/SBCV/Blender-Addon-Photogrammetry-Importer/blob/master/doc/markdown/point_cloud.md

Does anyone know how I could apply this project to my own? I do not understand the shader here. what is the ParticleColor node doing?

Also I tried creating a particle system and emitting Halo particles from all of the vertices in my cloud which worked and I could see all 900000 particles displaying smoothly, but I could not change any of their colors. Is it possible to change the color of individual Halos - just for visualizing in the viewport?

[Blended_Blue]

I still haven’t been successful drawing colored dots in Blender.

Is there a technical limitation that makes colored dots very difficult?

I know in Unity I wrote a functional geometry shader that works amazing well. But in Blender this is impossible without paying $50 to someone for a closed source solution…??

This is the most absurdity I have ever seen in Blender, why no colored dots?

[anon71893420]

The current particle system is EOL so the failings of the current particle system will surely be addressed with a new all singing all dancing nodal system in the short to medium term future.

As a work around you could use a single poly Custom Instance object with a Material on it to show colour in the viewport. You have to use Eevee but that might be better than nothing?

[Blended_Blue]

Thank you Inforgraph, it sounds interesting that in future possibly nodal system may be useful.

I am not sure if a single poly will be efficient and I tried using quad with a two million vertices point cloud and it took over 15 minutes to create the cloud. Also poly particles do not face the camera and at certain angles are almost non-visible…

But when using simple halo particles it took less than one second to generate all two million points and there was no lag in viewport.

I don’t need to render these verts!!! only need a way to display colored dots in viewport for reference.

Is there anything else I can try? I have never had such a difficult time in Blender with Anything else before, why is colored dots a impossible feature in Blender?

[anon71893420]

You could export the particles as Alembic particles.

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