Point Cloud Plugin v0.5
After a loong time in early access, the v0.5 is finally out as stable! And bringing an equally loong list of changes and improvements!
Head over to the project’s website for more info and download links!
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Release Notes
New Features / Improvements
- Completely redesigned data structure and rendering approach. This results in significantly reduced number of draw calls as well as VRAM used. Manual input of section sizes is no longer necessary, as the plugin runs adaptive spatial division
- Point clouds are now processed at component, rather than actor, level. This means they can easily be blueprinted
- Added option to render sprites as single triangles rather than quads, thus increasing performance. Use **Single Poly Minimum LOD **setting to specify at which LOD should the sprites be switched over to single poly. Use **Single Poly Scale **property to help mitigate potential gaps between triangles (exercise caution though, as setting it too high will negatively affect performance)
- Render data (Vertex and Index Buffers) is only residing in VRAM if it is actually used (i.e. hiding or switching levels will remove the unused data sets)
- There is a settings section dedicated to Color Adjustment now, you can find it under Rendering group
- LOD Coloration mode now fully supports sprite view
- Fast and seamless adjustment of LODs
- Alpha color can now be imported and used inside the material
- Significantly reduced RAM usage
- Support for UE 4.20 and UE 4.21
- Import All button
- Point Clouds now support reimporting
- Importing Point Clouds will auto-adjust the RenderMethod to avoid coloration issues
- Importing Point Clouds will auto-adjust some performance settings
- Improved Runtime operations
- Improved importing performance
- Improved RGB range detection
Fixes
- Added includes that were reported missing on various platforms/compilers
- The plugin should now be compilable as Editor-level plugin
- Patched few memory leaks
- Fixed few importing issues with column names not being recognized properly
- Fixed engine crash when one of the location channels was absent
- Fixed RGB scan returning strange values when no channel has been selected
- Fixed RGB range not being auto-calculated properly in some situations
- Brightness now correctly affects clouds with Color Override set
- Setting Color Override no longer disables LOD Coloration view
- Fixed engine crash when importing certain clouds
- Fixed importing doubling a subset of points sometimes
Other Changes
- Default Sprite Size Bias reduced from 0.775 to 0.75 as a response to the modified LOD calculation method
- LOD Bias and LOD Aggressiveness have been replaced with View Distance and LOD Distribution settings allowing for much better control of density distribution.
- Required Shader Model has been reduced from 5 to 4
- Low precision is now always available
- Filename of the file being imported is now visible inside the import window
- Import window slightly redesigned
- Some settings suggestions will now appear via Message Log