I have created a method and a corresponding instructional video demonstrating how to get point clouds generated by the Faro LiDAR scanner into Blender. This method does not rely on any unsupported plugins that may break later, and it is likely to work with Leica scanners as well. However, it uses a very simple program that is Windows only - but it is so simple anyone could make something in its place for other platforms.
Point clouds are very dense and typically have a very large file size. Even at the lowest setting, your scanner is likely to produce enough data to overwhelm even the 64bit version of Blender. What’s needed after scanning your environment is a way to reduce the amount of data in the scan without losing so much data that the scan itself has become useless. The software provided by Faro does not offer that capability at this time. So what I had to do was make a very simple text line removing program that is intended to run on the very simple ASCII XYZ format. Every line in an XYZ file represents a three dimensional point. So if you need to have this solution on something other than Windows, simply make a program that can delete lines in a proportionally-even manner. My program asks for a percentage the user desires to keep out of the total data of the original file.
The instructional video uses annotations in place of audio, so be sure to turn that on if you’ve turned it off in the past. You can watch it here:
After that, all you need to do is import the XYZ into Mesh Lab, then export to the venerable VRML format (WRL). You can download Mesh Lab from the following address: http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
I cant remember of the top of my head but I remember converting a XYZ file over to an OBJ file pretty easily, i think i added in a v to the start of every line and added in some header information. I think i just did it in notepad++
I can try and recreate my steps if anyone is interested?
I was planning to add this functionality to my program, but I didn’t have enough time. I’ve had a lot of success using VRML in the past, so that was my first pick. I’ll have to toy with OBJ to see how it behaves.
As for the alternatives - I know. I haven’t had a great experience with python plugins in general and I shy away from becoming too dependent on them. The developer forgets about them and Blender updates tend to break them as a result.
I was thinking about workflow and it occurred to me that it may not be all that terribly useful unless you borrowed the scanner but still somehow don’t have enough money for Revit. If you have Revit, you’re going to want to model the scene in that, then import it into Max (or maybe Blender if you like it) for the small details and better rendering controls.
In my case, I work for a business that has one, and I was asked to be more thoughtful about my software choices, the time I was spending on it, and etc. We’re very new to the technology, so I have room to mess around with it to get more familiar, however it’s plain as day that I should have been using Revit, then maybe finish it up in Blender or Max if I chose to take it that far. This method might be useful for exact positioning of the picture frames, small things, and furniture should one decide to model that in Blender. But it’s not really necessary.
