100 million point cloud

Someone just brought me an e57 with 100 million colored points - Rhino 6 opens it easily (takes a minute or so, ~4Gb memory use) and the thing spins like it was just a simple box… :smile:

On the other hand, as I don’t have RhinoTerrain for V6 (don’t think it’s available yet), I tried MeshPatch to create a terrain mesh. Rhino thinks about it for about a second or two then just exits the command without doing anything. I believe can hear it thinking…

“Hmmm, you want a mesh from point cloud huh? OK, lemme count the points there first… Whoa, 100 million points! No way, it’s Friday afternoon, not even going to touch that one, or I’ll be here all weekend!!! See ya…”

Maybe I’ll try Monday.

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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One approach for use Patch with a mesh which has a very large number of points is to use Contour to create several sets of curves through the points, and then use Patch on the curves.

But Mitch’ case is that he doesn’t have a mesh.

One can contour the points themselves IIRC, however that’s not what I hoped to achieve… I wanted a mesh through every point. I wonder if splitting the point cloud into parts and meshing the parts would work, then join. However, I’m just messing around with this, it’s not a real project…

CloudCompare, maybe … I mean the meshing isn’t the greatest but it might work. I have not had Meshlab work with over 20 million points, but maybe its better now.

I do have access to Geomagic which should handle this if you could share the file.

Hi Mitch - in case you don’t have something already, I made a script for someone that splits a PC out into boxes and layerizes them etc. I think it works.
PointBoxer.py (4.7 KB)
Oops. forgot to set the parent layer. Fixed.

-Pascal

Thanks Pascal. I was going to try to create the meshes in RhinoTerrain, which I have for V5. I can save the file out from V6 as a V5 file, but V5 just crashes when I try to open it. So I thought I would write an export script to batch a certain number of .xyz files, try to mesh each one in V5 and then join the meshes in V6. But that’s just too much work for just playing around… If I wanted to limit the .xyz files to a million points each, that’s 100 files to export and mesh… :dizzy_face: