Best way to cast heatmaps onto a 3d interactive object

Hi, I am working on a school project and I want to create heatmaps onto surface meshes. The heatmap would be represented based on attention values assigned to the point cloud.

The steps I have in mind is to create point cloud → create triangular surface meshes → calculate attention scores → assign heatmap textures to the surface meshes.

2 approaches would be either Mapping the Texture2D onto the mesh using UV coordinates or Triplanar Mapping with 3D Texture

I would like to hear your opinions on which has a better workflow and easier to produce from free resources considering I am not using other software such as (Blender, Rhino) for creating point cloud and mesh. Thank you!!