PointCloudEngine Save Abandoned

Overview

• Two seperate point cloud renderers with support for splatting and phong lighing
• Ground Truth Renderer renders a subset of the point cloud and can input it into a neural network
• Octree Renderer builds an octree in a preprocessing step and renders the point cloud with LOD control
• PlyToPointcloud tool for converting .ply files with x,y,z,nx,ny,nz,red,green,blue format into the required .pointcloud format

Getting Started

• Follow install guide for latest Windows 10 64-Bit release from Releases
• Drag and drop your .ply files onto PlyToPointcloud.exe
• Adjust the Settings.txt file (optional)
• Run PointCloudEngine.exe
• Open a generated .pointcloud file with File->Open
• Use the File menu to switch between the two renderers
• Move the camera with WASD, holding the right mouse button rotates the camera

Configuring the rendering parameters

• Select the Splat view mode
• Move the camera so close that the individual splats are visible (depending on the scale this might not happen)
• Adjust the Sampling Rate in such a way that the splats overlap just a bit
• Enable Blending, look at the point cloud from various distances and adjust the blend factor with so that only close surfaces are blended together

Developer Setup

• Install the following on your Windows machine at the default install locations
  • HDF5
  • Cuda 10.0
  • Anaconda 3.7 for all users and add it to PATH
  • Python environment in Visual Studio Installer (no need to install Python 3.7)
  • Visual Studio 2019 Extension Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects
• Run admin command line:
  • conda install pytorch torchvision cudatoolkit=10.0 -c pytorch

Example for supported .ply file

ply
format ascii 1.0
element vertex 3
property float x
property float y
property float z
property float nx
property float ny
property float nz
property uchar red
property uchar green
property uchar blue
end_header
1 0 0 1 0 0 255 0 0
0 1 0 0 1 0 0 255 0
0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 255

Copyright © Moritz Schöpf. All rights reserved. The use, distribution and change of this software and the source code without written permission of the author is prohibited.