Interesting.
So let me get this straight for the other philistines of the forum:
- You take your point cloud (pcl)
- You sample it to fit the pixel count of a square texture (in this case 128x128 so 16384 points as you pointed out)
- You convert each x,y,z position to a 0-255 scale
- You convert your “xyz” csv into a texture for which each raw equal to a pixel with its rgb values
- You “extract” those rgb values inside UE4 so that it reads it as a coordinate system for a 256x256x256 cube
- You can “beef up” this cube density with a greater image depth which allow you to save rgb values with extended decimals
That seems quite a complicated system to import a point cloud and it comes with a lot of limitations.
How many points can you expect to load before it critically impact the performance ?
Maybe pursuing the integration of the pcl library inside UE would be a more productive way to toy around with pcl inside this engine (https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?90408-Point-Cloud-Library-in-UE4) ?
To be honest I wanted to do it, but my C++ skill are not that good and I was not able to move forward on this project.
Also, I was impressed by the gpu particle system you can see in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfhEULONgs8.