Point Cloud Plugin

[stojke-y]

This plugin sounds great, I may try it at some point. What license is it under currently and what are your licensing plans when you fully release it.

If I may suggest, you should probably make some demo videos, so people can see how it looks and works without of installing it.

[phoboz]

stojke-y
MIT, free for all
I have few videos and screenshots, but the scans are not my data, so just waiting for a go-ahead from the owners to publish them here

[xN31]

duke22 I had it successfully load files 25gb+, it shouldn't crash. What file are you loading and how much RAM do you have? Don't suppose this file is available somewhere for download to test?

LegendreVR Haven't tested this with Unreal Studio, but can't see why it wouldn't work. Version 0.1 was code only, 0.2 has all necessary binaries included so should start and deploy with content-only projects too. Are you using 4.18 or 4.19? Were there any errors? Could you send me your log file?

Hello Phoboz, your plugin sounds really interesting! Any chance of a small sample project showing how to use it? I may be missing something, I just found the comments in the source code but no other documentation

[mukti5000]

phoboz

Awesome, thank you!

[duke22]

Yeah really amazing effort phoboz !

[Thunder_Owl]

Some sample project would be nice to have

[phoboz]

Thanks for the feedback!

I'll upload some samples / video tutorials as soon as I'm back from holidays

But essentially it's just:
1. Drag and drop TXT or XYZ to content browser (importer should work with any column-based text file)
2. Select columns to import
3. Drag and drop the imported asset onto the scene

[xN31]

Thanks for the feedback!

I'll upload some samples / video tutorials as soon as I'm back from holidays

But essentially it's just:
1. Drag and drop TXT or XYZ to content browser (importer should work with any column-based text file)
2. Select columns to import
3. Drag and drop the imported asset onto the scene

Wow, that was much simpler than expected!! worked flawlessly with a 1.5 GB xyz point cloud, nothing short than amazing! ;-)

[xN31]

Wow, that was much simpler than expected!! worked flawlessly with a 1.5 GB xyz point cloud, nothing short than amazing! ;-)

Just one question about LODs, how does the curve work? How do I define which LOD should be used at which distance (and how can I visualise which LOD is being used and where)?
Performances in general are pretty good with the default settings, but I'm trying to squeeze out a bit more of performance for a VR project.

[phoboz]

X axis is the distance, Y is the LOD level. Each subsequent LOD halves the point count inside the section. Depending on the bounds of the cloud, it might be useful to tweak the section size to not generate massive amounts of draw calls (those are displayed in the stats panel).

There's currently no way to visualize the LODs.

[LegendreVR]

EDIT : Found the solution, Cloud Compare shifts your model to compensate for 32bit coordinates on 64bit clouds, you have to shift it back to 0 to get your cloud to look good


Hey phoboz ! I've been benchmarking your plugin the last two days and I have a problem, although I'm not sure if this is from the plugin or my exports...

I'm importing an ascii based cloud and getting this weird banding in UE4.



Model looks fine in Cloud Compare.



Now a lot of our models have coordinates very far away from 0,0,0 and I noticed that the banding was present in CC until I centered it on import. Could it be the same kind of problem in your plugin with 32bits coordinates instead of 64bits giving us approximative results ? The UE4 import seen above has been recentered using the "first point" Transformation offset by the way.

Another thing you might have noted on the screenshots : it seems that the model is mirrored compared to its source ?

[phoboz]

Hey LegendreVR

This indeed looks like lack of precision. I only had this happen for large clouds with half precision selected (as it then uses 16 bit floats), confirm that you didn't accidentally enable it.

Try centering it using cloud center option and see if it changes anything (it shouldn't, but it won't hurt).

Alternatively, depending on how the points are ordered it might be the auto LODing - does it also show with LOD0?

The data is internally stored as floats, so if the original offsets are large enough it could be causing the bottleneck. I might add an option to import and store the data as doubles up until its handed over to UE4 rendering. This should allow for transform modifications without accuracy loss at the expense of double the size footprint.

EDIT:
I don't know why it comes through mirrored, which axis is reversed? You can use negative scale for it to flip it back until I find the issue.

[LegendreVR]

Right so it looks a lot better now, nothing to do in unreal, it was all CC witchery (see edit in previous post) !




I was using 32bit floats for the plugin, nothing changed in the source header.

On the LOD subject, every time I try to enter a 0 value on X for the lod curve the engine crashes. So the LOD0 is actually LOD1 ?

Looks like the mirrored axis is X if I compare the model in UE and CC.

[phoboz]

LOD0 should be the original data. What is the cloud's VRAM size (you can find it on the info panel of the cloud)?

It may crash if you exceed the VRAM of your GPU.

[oppne]

Getting this error when trying to build plugin in a project
Severity Code Description Project File Line Suppression State
Error Plugin 'PointCloudPlugin' (referenced via default plugins) does not contain the 'PointCloud' module, but lists it in 'Y:\20180415_PointCloud\UE4\PointCloud\Plugins\PointCloudPlugin\PointCloudPlugin.uplugin'. PointCloud Y:\20180415_PointCloud\UE4\PointCloud\Intermediate\ProjectFiles\EXEC 1