Hi @onerobotband!
I think I’m doing exactly the same thing as your project, rendering point cloud into animation! I used Agisoft to photoscan some objects first then import them with this PCV into blender. Right now I’m trying to build animation with lots of point-cloud files. I wonder have you try to render cloud into animation in Cloudcompare?
And is there any updates from your project?
Looking forward to hearing back 
Hey @carbon2, I got here a cloud of 321mln points, and it does not load with 32GB of RAM crashing Blender, while Meshlab uses just 15GB of RAM with the same file.
Is there any trick I could do to load the file anyway? Or RAM upgrade is necessary in this case?
Anyone can drop some hints on how to workaround this? I would greatly appreciate feedback before I invest in hardware.
hi, that’s massive point cloud indeed, never tested such big file. PCV loads file and store points for displaying alongside with original points to enable exporting of original data, like if your point cloud have 16bit colors (like i have), or float64 locations, those are converted to 8bit colors and float32 for drawing on screen, so your data are at least twice in memory, i can add some preference setting to override that, this might help. also i have no idea what happens with data in blender once shader is created and used, so it might be there even one more time. but i can add such switch to prevent data duplication in PCV for this gargantuan clouds 
That would be fantastic
for everyone else with large datasets, empirically, you seems to need to fit it in memory twice, once as numpy array and once inside shader buffers. i had problems running any python memory profiling tool, but i will look into it some more, some parts can be optimized so they don’t cause temporary peaks in memory usage (at least i found one so far ).
This addon is fantastic!
I was wondering would it be possible to automatically load point clouds upon opening a blend file?
Also, do you have a link for donations?
no. point cloud data is not stored in blend file, blender has no mechanism for that.
will put it for sale on blendermarket soon, so you can buy it there to support development
also, loading/preparing takes time and it will lock blender for various lengths of time at file open, and i am not mentioning, there would be needed some persistent function watching for file loading and checking if some object has some point cloud set up, even when you are not using it, this will slow down blender globally a bit…
Hey, it actually works a bit. I imported the mesh file from what I photoscanned, then converted it into ico sphere. I found it funny that “Convert” is supposed to work from point cloud to mesh, but I actually converted mesh to point even though they are greatly separated apart.
Even though I did render animation from these models, I’m still aiming for creating these point cloud in a much finer look…
I’m debating should I explore other software like 3ds Max or I should keep exploring blender…
Looking forward to hearing back from you!!
the support of point clouds in max is very basic compared to PCV
The only adventage is if you want to render in pixel size with raytracing for interpolation to avoid flickering ( using vray, very slow render)
convert is only ‘instancing’ some basic mesh on points. that’s why i did call it like that. there are many real meshing options out there, eg meshlab
Hey.
Yes using metashape for my point cloud creation and importing into cloud compare. Within cloud compare I set up views and use the animation plugin to create image sequences between them. I’ve been upscaling for better quality / the right point size vs density of the cloud. It’s all a guessing game and quite intuitive as one setting doesn’t suit all projects.
For rendering final videos I use either the blender vse or import image sequences into video editing software; i use davinci resolve, would prefer adobe but it’s not free.
Is anyone else having trouble preloading sequences?
I’m trying to import an animation I captured on Xbox’s Kinect. When I try to load the sequence of Ply files from my folder, I get a success message that the files were loaded…but then the animation won’t play (it stays stuck in the single frame I had loaded before).
Has anybody who’s been through this know a fix?
hi, there was api change, you are using 2.81 i guess? reinstall from repo, i just fixed it
Yes I am. It’s working now, so thank you very much!
Thank you for sharing this amazing addon.
I’m using 2.82 and I can’t seem to install the add-on…
Does compatibility end at 2.81?
i recently bumped minimal version to 2.81 because of api changes, but 2.82 should work without any problem. at least works for me. how are you installing it? can you download repo from github as zip, unzip and from blender locate space_view3d_point_cloud_visualizer.py and click install? repo is not addon by itself, so trying to install downloaded zip will not work
That’s exactly what i’m doing.
Blender says:
Modules Installed () from 'D:\\...\\space_view3d_point_cloud_visualizer.py' into 'C:\\...\\addons'
So , it should have worked, but it is nowhere to be seen in the add-on list in Preferences.
and can you verify that space_view3d_point_cloud_visualizer.py is present in addon directory? on windows according to https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/blender_directory_layout.html is here: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.82\scripts\addons\
