Point Cloud Visualizer

jerbot · October 18, 2019, 6:16pm

Sorry, that was a little confusing.

And after making more screenshots… and animated gifs… I’m realizing I am mistaken. FALSE ALARM! No problems… just my brain and lack of sleep.

Edg422 · October 31, 2019, 12:11am

Thanks for this tool, it helps a lot on making presentations based on scanned data.
Any idea on a workflow to make the Point Cloud “Renderable” in an animation, overlapped with other objects? I used the particle system on this tool, but the pre-processing time of the render was big, although the result was really good.
I also tested the method with volume rendering but it doesn’t look solid and the colors are lost.

carbon2 · October 31, 2019, 8:33am

maybe, make another pass with geometry and cryptomatte and mask it out in compositing. not quite nice solution, but that’s what you can do now. and particle instances will work too, if you don’t have some crazy point counts.
i can try to add something, like masking with object collection, but no promises…

carbon2 · October 31, 2019, 8:36am

what’s that?

Kiyo_Yang · October 31, 2019, 4:31pm

@carbon2

Really appreciated this addon that you created! It definitely saves a bunch hell of time to import point-cloud files.
I’m a super newbie to Blender, and trying to build animation with a lot of point-cloud files (and they are quite big files). I’m aiming to accomplish like this work: https://vimeo.com/329344324

Do you think it’s possible to achieve the effect like that with your tool in Blender?
Are there any suggestions or would you be interested in posting any simple tutorials to render point-cloud into animation?

Any help will be extremely appreciated!!
Thank you again in advance :]

Kiyo

carbon2 · November 1, 2019, 4:05am

hi, PCV has some limitations, for example, it can’t render more ply files at once, so you would need to join them into one to be able to render them depth sorted, then you might run out of memory… also i don’t even remember if it can render ply sequence to have it animated… so i think you can do something with it, but rendering is not that developed yet…

edit: sequences can be rendered

Balda · November 1, 2019, 10:08am

I dowloaded space_view3d_point_cloud_visualizer.py today at Github and installed addon but nothing appears in the addons list, neither on the n panel etc… I am using 2.81 alpha.
Does anyone else has the same issue?

carbon2 · November 1, 2019, 10:47am

works on 2.81 and 2.82 for me, try to download repo as zip, unzip and then install from file

carbon2 · November 1, 2019, 10:49am

or from this direct link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/uhlik/bpy/master/space_view3d_point_cloud_visualizer.py
it’s almost 13k lines, more than 0.5mb, so wait it is finished, also it is that large that github doesn’t show it whole…

Balda · November 1, 2019, 1:35pm

Thanks, I’ll try this and let you know

Balda · November 1, 2019, 3:18pm

It works now, many thanks!

Edg422 · November 2, 2019, 8:07pm

See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Ex4BmD4ec

Also, here is explained deeper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh7T-1Fifng&

Edg422 · November 2, 2019, 8:09pm

Does the “Render” option in the PCV comes with a Z Depth pass? That would pretty much make the trick!

Kiyo_Yang · November 2, 2019, 9:30pm

Thank you for your reply!

I wonder have you tried to use C4D to render point-cloud into animation? Or is there any other software that you recommend building animation like the work I mentioned (also for a beginner ) Cuz I feel like once I import large point-cloud file, Blender would crash immediately.

Thanks again!

carbon2 · November 3, 2019, 5:06pm

PCV can convert points to particles, a bit more complicated way, but orientation (point normal) will be kept which might be useful. and the second link, PCV can convert to vertex only mesh (and i think much faster that builtin ply importer), then it’s how you setup the rendering of densities…

no, i tried to extract depth component from opengl framebuffer, but it seems to be 8bit only and when you try to extract some meaningful mask from it, the result is just posterized mess…

i still think (did not tried) you can make quick cycles render without cloud, with cryptomatte enabled and then mask out from points render occluded areas with it.

carbon2 · November 3, 2019, 5:18pm

no and no, i’m sorry. there are several programs that can show you point clouds, but i have no idea which (if any) can do some animations with them.

the crashes might be you run out of memory… largest cloud i ever tried was ~50m and it was much more that my machine can handle (32gb ram, 4gb vram)

carbon2 · November 3, 2019, 5:21pm

have a look at cloudcompare: https://www.cloudcompare.org/
it can do some animations: https://www.cloudcompare.org/doc/wiki/index.php?title=Animation_(plugin)

carbon2 · November 3, 2019, 6:41pm

update: 0.9.30 join filter, ui tweaks, fixes

edit: eyedroppers on all object selections, ply loader now handles more data types definitions

Join

Join current active point cloud with another on different object. Object transformations are applied to clouds to look the same as before joining.

Object - select object with another point cloud to join
Join - run operator

Edg422 · November 4, 2019, 4:24pm

i still think (did not tried) you can make quick cycles render without cloud, with cryptomatte enabled and then mask out from points render occluded areas with it.

The problem is, my objects are mixed with the cloud (to show some replacements), so parts of the the cloud are occluded by the objects, and some parts of the objects are occluded by the cloud.

Anyway, I’ll keep looking for a way, but the particle system with spheres is doing a great work for now, the only problem is the time to Render.

Thanks again for this awesome plugin!

Kiyo_Yang · November 12, 2019, 3:24pm

Thank you, I’ll keep look into it! You have been a great help