I’m looking at the potential of using point cloud data. Has anyone found a way to render this kind of information in Unity?
Cheers
~A
Depends on how you want to render it.
If its purely as point data then In Unity 4.0 and the ability to render a mesh topology of points should make it easy. Though I suspect its limited to max of 65535 points as Unity uses 16 bit indices. Alternately if you can do this on dx11 hardware, you could use compute and geometry shaders with mesh topology points to render huge numbers of points.
If you need to convert the points into a surface then you’ll going to have to invest in writing some scripts to triangulate the data etc.That is probably going to be a lot harder and require a fair amount of work, depending upon the complexity and requirements of your point data.
Made some tests here earlier, 40million points seems to be possible, or ~20mil with RGB or intensity (used 2 buffers, maybe some way to pack colors into less space…)
Or could even use multiple particle systems…65k points each…
** new version submitted to assetstore,
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Hi, can you tell me the bast way to render a point cloud in unity up to now?
Thanks in advance!
Hi, can you tell me the bast way to render a point cloud in unity up to now?
Thanks in advance!
Just bumping arash_pix’s question - any advice how about standard/best ways to render point clouds with Unity?
Thanks
Only those that were mentioned in earlier links (dx11, mesh or particles), I dont know if other ways are possible/useful…
But unity is not really suitable for point cloud viewing really (other than “small” amounts)…so its always better to use proper viewers (Pointools being one of the best)
Thanks!
Currently, I’m trying to get a simple 720 vertex array skinned. Selected white dots on a galaxy image, made alpha channel of selection, made path from selection, exported paths as .AI. Imported that into 3ds max as .AI file, selected all 720 loop ‘islands’, shift-dragged the loops up and collapsed all loops. Copied the now singular vertices into standalone vertex cloud. Had to hand create triangles between verts, then convert to spline so I could delete some edges to get a more ‘space lanes’ kind of look. Total pain in the ass. I can’t believe 3ds max 2009 doesn’t skin, nor does blender, and meshlab crashes when I work through their ‘skinning’ tuts for point clouds.
So, at present, I’m having to approach this via the carpal tunnel flareup route.
So, if I want to use this on a mobile device (android), I will not be able to use DX11. Does this mean it will not work at all, or that there are substantial limitations to the point cloud density? Is there any way to get this on a mobile device?
Not the DX11 viewer, but the pointcloud to mesh converter works, as it just creates standard unity mesh assets from the points. Just tried with 2.5million points, it displays ok, but trying to rotate the view gets pretty low <1fps… (tested on “ceros revolution” android clone)
** Added that 2.5million points android build apk download here: (its bit too much for mobile, but atleast it runs… should filter the cloud first or leave out some of them…)
http://unitycoder.com/blog/2014/03/19/asset-store-point-cloud-viewer-unity/