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Overview

• Two seperate point cloud renderers with support for splatting and phong lighing
• Ground Truth Renderer directly renders a subset of the point cloud without preprocessing
• 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

• Install DirectX11 and HDF5
• Download and extract the latest Windows 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 [O]
• Press [H] for help and [R] to switch between the two renderers

Configuring the rendering parameters

• Go into Splat view mode with [ENTER]
• Move the camera so close that the individual splats are visible (depending on the scale this might not happen)
• Press [Q/E] to adjust the sample rate in such a way that the splats overlap just a bit
• Enable Blending with [B], look at the point cloud from various distances and adjust the blend factor with [V/N] so that only close surfaces are blended together

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