Author Topic: 3DS max point cloud render  (Read 13170 times)

2015-09-27, 20:53:48

btam

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Hi,

I suspect it is not on the top of the feature list to implement but is it planned to render point cloud with Corona in 3DS max?

Tamas

2015-09-28, 09:19:10
Reply #1

btam

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Sorry it was late when I was sending this. I see it in the wrong forum. Could you please move it?Sorry about it.

2015-09-28, 10:05:30
Reply #2

atelieryork

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+1 from me. We had a job come in last week that was potentially going to involve a point cloud.

Out of interest, what kind of workflow for this are you currently using? We found that max could natively read a .PTS file but beyond that the data was basically useless. All you can do is view the cloud and change its display properties. No meshing controls or anything like that. How are you dealing with them?
Alex York
Atelier York
www.atelieryork.co.uk
max 2016 sp1, corona 1.3 final, win 8.1. pro

2015-09-28, 12:14:16
Reply #3

btam

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Thx for moving the topic.

atelieryork: I own a land surveying company so I have experience with the processing of point clouds. I only use 3DS max/Corona as a private hobby and I'm not even good in it but I found Corona way better/easier then the builtin render engines (speed also seems better). So regarding the point clouds: Basically for buildings/etc it is much better to remodell it based on point cloud, but the process is time consuming (we use 3rd party Software and Revit for it). The other possibility is to create a mesh from point cloud but in that case vegetation could be a problem (or you need a very detailed on site measurement). Anway for the second method you need some additional software. There are some free/opensource program but in my experience if you have over 50M points they are not the best choice (i'm open always for learning something new so if anybody on different opinion could convince me). For opensource: Meshlab/Cloudcompare are the best start I think.

In the current situation we will build a new house with my wife so I have measured our land with laserscanner. Now the Architect has a preliminary design and I wanted to do some daylight analysis with the point cloud. Without it it would be very easy but there are some trees surrounding in the building so it would have been good to see how it's effect the sunlight in the house. The Mental Ray render seems to very slow and the result is not the best. If it wasn't  so slow it would be an option for indoor sun anyway.

Anyway if it will be implemented in Corona I wonder how they can solve the color problem. I was thinking grey point cloud which color receives/cast light/cast shadow. As the orgiginal RGB color of the point cloud is affected the real enviroment lights station by station the resultis very strange sometimes.

I really don't know how Corona works inside but I'm just curious about if it could be handled as a corona proxy or scatter object? The idea comes for me that with proxy you could switch to point cloud visualisation so I assume it is basically has that information in the file. In this case it would be "easy" to convert point cloud to a proxy object.


2015-09-28, 12:17:16
Reply #4

atelieryork

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Interesting! I've heard of meshlab and the process involving Revit but I've yet to see any good examples of cloud > mesh for a detailed interior, for example. It's something I'm going to look into more.

Cheers,
Alex York
Atelier York
www.atelieryork.co.uk
max 2016 sp1, corona 1.3 final, win 8.1. pro

2015-09-28, 12:55:45
Reply #5

pokoy

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If you want to do meshing within Max the best choice is Frost from Thinkbox imo. You can use Krakatoa in evaluation mode (without ever purchasing a license, they have left this functionality in for exactly this reason) to load some of the most common point cloud formats and use Frost to do the meshing. It's super-fast and very robust, I am using this all the time to produce 3d printable meshes from very complicated models. Krakatoa/Frost will read and process color information and display them nicely in the viewport. Rendering, however, is not possible without a license in Krakatoa (or only to a limited resolution, don't remember).
Modeling from point clouds is a completely different story. Since there's no point averaging for snapping or modeling in Max you pretty much have to eyeball everything you do. In the CAD market however, there are programs that specialize in automatic parametric modeling from point clouds and do a very good job mostly with some manual interaction, but their price tag is astronomic compared to the prices we're used to pay for DCC apps.

We use meshes from scans all the time for our work here as a guide but since these are very dense and inaccurate (like metaballs if you want) we re-model everything from scratch. Still, it would be absolutely impossible to get the level of accuracy and detail we need without the scans, so they prove to be extremely useful.

2015-09-28, 13:20:55
Reply #6

atelieryork

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Really interesting thanks for the pointers. Going to check out those packages soon. I think a rough mesh approximation would be useful as reference.
Alex York
Atelier York
www.atelieryork.co.uk
max 2016 sp1, corona 1.3 final, win 8.1. pro

2017-01-18, 22:12:12
Reply #7

ylucic

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+1 here too.

We are doing at the office a viz with some LiDAR data. 20+GB of raw data. 500 Million points.... Really cool stuff. But mentalray is slooow as hell, vray doesnt do any point color rendering but it can render the pointcloud loader in max. So in the mean time we are doing the animations in ptools, cool software but booooring.... and had to transfer all the camera animations to the other software.

Would be nice to have it rendered in Corona.

I'm reliving this thread because of the recent post in the gallery about photogrametry. Maybe rendering some assets as point clouds from photos, laser, kinect, etc. could make some workflows a bit faster. Instead of meshing or do some retopology at the end.

Industrial Designer
SCL

2017-05-01, 16:46:30
Reply #8

ktulu

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+1 from me as well.
In our office (landscape architecture & civil engineering) we are using point clouds to quickly display existing context for our designs. For our needs it would be enough if Corona had something similar to Mental Ray's Point Cloud Shader:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-49CE0ACB-1345-4D50-B6E5-361DBFDB5B33-htm.html

Currently we can display the point cloud in the viewport, but it doesn't render at all.

2020-09-01, 16:56:07
Reply #9

Harald

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+1 From me.
I had to revert to Arnold renderer for making rendering of a point cloud work, which it did fine, but I so much prefer to use Corona, also because my entire library of assets id textured with Corona materials.
In my line of work (Infrastructure engineering company) I'm seeing more and more pointclouds coming by and it would be a shame to have to use Arnold on more and more projects just because of that. Simple renderer would be fine, what I see in max's viewport would even suffice. 1 Point = 1 pixel in the renderer.

I've read that Max dev team is planing on a mesher for pointclouds, but there's no date mentioned so that can take years. And then I still don't know how good it works.

2020-11-18, 11:13:49
Reply #10

maru

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Logged as a feature request.

(Internal ID=597104633)
Marcin Miodek | chaos-corona.com
3D Support Team Lead - Corona | contact us

2021-10-20, 17:51:02
Reply #11

johan belmans

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Already an old thread and feature request :-)

But in the past years the SLAM technology has evolved and more common in the world of architecture..
It would be great if the Dev Team can make point cloud rendering in Corona possible.