RickyBlender suggested that maybe somebody hanging out in this place might know: How To Make LiDAR Points Into Their Own Objects
Does anybody have an idea as to how best to unilaterally assign a simple object; e.g., a meta-ball, to a large volume of LiDAR points? Since they’re basically a big mess of unconnected vertices floating around, there’s no surface for them at render time.
The workflow begins with exporting (for the this test) about 8k points as a dxf and importing them into Blender. For this experiment, I want to try and keep the solid’s appearance simple and kind of small in size so the idea that this is a point cloud model is clear.
MetaBalls will work, up to 10k points quite fast. 3-4 seconds. (I have a ParticleMesher that works almost this way but uses particles, no Vertices. Would need a few changes though to do what you want.) But i don’t think MetaBalls are the best approach to mesh point clouds (lidar sort pc). It’s comparable to Marching Cubes in Meshlab.
Meshlab Surface Reconstruction: Poisson gives much better results (for lidar scan type pc)
For Blender there’s an Addon, Point Cloud Skinner by Hans.P.G. That works similar to Meshlabs Poisson thing. but it is slow… You might try this out.
But the real issue i think is Blenders Vertex have no Color information… So you can not extrat those data to your Mesh - which again Meshlab can quite easily.
I honestly suggest you to forget doing this in Blender, and do it in Meshlab, then import the model in Blender.
try this tutorial for Meshlab. from 2009, but still exactly the same workflow.
Edit: Volume will work, BI and Cycles, but again no color…
Yes, I saw this post and am sorry not to have replied sooner. I’ve wanted to try everybody’s ideas before replying. The thing is, I’m not interested in making a mesh, but rather in helping to visualize some other science; namely, the classification algorithm MCC-LIDAR. The other thing that makes me slow is I’m very rusty having not touched Blender in many months so I’m fumbling around trying to remember things
