Name: Point Cloud Visualizer
Brand: Jakub Uhlík
Price: 75.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (16 reviews)

Point Cloud Visualizer

How to render points in Cycles or Eeveee (with colors)?

points need to be converted to Blender native data type that can be rendered in engine. Conversion target is mesh vertices with Geometry Nodes to turn them to instances or points, see PCV > Convert panel
Converting points will create suitable color data and adds basic material using it so colors are preserved and available for render engine
mesh instances can be rendered in Cycles and Eevee, points are supported only by Cycles

Points are missing when blend file is saved and reopened?

PCV does not store loaded points in blend file because there is no suitable data type available. only PCV settings and path to data file is stored. when blend file is reopened, points need to loaded or imported from linked file again by clicking Draw button.
if you are working with multiple PLY clouds at once, you can use PCV 3d viewport panel (viewport header top right corner: cloud icon) to Draw all PCV instances in scene at once
any changes to points made with PCV have to be saved using Export panel to PLY before quiting Blender or loading blend file otherwise will be lost
other option is to use Pack option that will automatically convert points to hidden mesh datablock on blend file save and restore on blend file load, but since blender uses only single precision floating point numbers for vertex positions, geolocated point data will lost its precision and cannot be moved exactly back. if you don't need to export points back to "world" locations (i.e. LAS/LAZ or E57 files) you can ignore this limitation

I got warning icons and `Missing vertex normals`, `Missing vertex colors` and `Missing scalars` messages in `Display` panel

loaded data does not have normals, colors or scalar fields so affected shading options cannot work properly, missing values are substitued by default normal or colors (exact values are in PCV > Load > General)

Where is documentation?

Optional Libraries Compatibility

Windows
- do NOT install Open3D and PyMeshLab together, Blender will crash when one and the other is used (see documentation workaround)
- do NOT install Open3D and pye57 together, Blender will crash when one and the other is used (see documentation workaround)
- do NOT install Open3D and laspy+ laszip together, Blender will crash when one and the other is used (see documentation workaround)
- PCV will prevent crashes by default by monitoring which library has been used in current Blender session and not allowing problematic operation to be run, this behavior can be turned off in PCV preferences
macOS
- on Apple Silicon you need to use Blender Intel build to install and use PyMeshLab
- pye57 have to be built from source, see step by step guide in PCV full documentation
Linux
- no known limitations/problems

Where are Optional Libraries used?

About Optional Libraries

NONE of them is required for regular use, majority of PCV functionality has no dependencies
functionality that depends on any library is marked in PCV panel with plugin icon
all of them are installed from The Python Package Index (PyPI) using pip command
libraries are not installed automatically, you need to open PCV preferences and click each install library button
they are installed to user site-packages directory as defined in site.getusersitepackages(), exact location differs for each platform, if you click Read Me First button in PCV preferences, it will print out path to user site-packages directory

Blender Compatibility

Platform Compatibility

works on Windows, Linux and macOS
see Optional Libraries Compatibility for more details on 3rd party libraries

Large Datasets

currently, PCV needs to load all points from source file and keep them in system memory
during loading, system memory usage will peak quite high, 4 (and more in some cases) times the runtime usage
for display, PCV need to upload all points that are going to be displayed (you can control amount with PCV > Display > Percentage slider) to gpu memory
to determine approximate maximum number of points your gpu can display at once you can use calculator in PCV preferences (for example 8GB gpu can display ~300M points with default shader and disabled scalars), calculator formula is simple:
```
ram = 8192  # MB
b = (1024*1024) * ram  # bytes
# default shader uses 3x float32 for point location and 4x float32 for color (rgba)
# float32 takes 4 bytes, hence 3*4 + 4*4 bytes
n = int(b / (12 + 16))
print(n)  # 306783378
```
trying to display more points (i.e. uploading more data than gpu memory can contain) will result in Blender crash or freeze
when extremely big data need to be loaded and is not required to work with exactly all points, alternative loading methods Every Nth or Slice can be used to reduce number of points during loading

Is there a trial version?

Installation

How to update to a new PCV version?

download latest version point_cloud_visualizer-###.zip
start Blender, go to Preferences > Add-ons and find PCV in list
expand by clicking left corner triangle
disable PCV unchecking checkbox next to addon name
click Remove button
click Save Preferences button at bottom (skip if you have Auto-Save Preferences enabled)
quit Blender
start Blender
install new PCV version and enable

How to install Optional Libraries?

please see compatibility notes for your platform in documentation
go to Preferences > Add-ons and find PCV
expand to see PCV preferences
click Install LIBRARY_NAME button
wait until Blender is responsive again (if you start Blender from command line you can observe progress)
restart Blender after each installed library

Jakub Uhlík

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Tags: ply, las, cloud, gaussian splatting, pointcloud, scan, import, e57, point cloud, photogrammetry, 3D Scan, point, Visualization, lidar, laz, reconstruction, laser scan, pts, retopology, scanning, importer, 3dscan