3D model to Point Cloud file?

I’m quite curious if it’s possible to create a Point Cloud file from the complex 3D model.

The aim is to send the 3D models to a cloud platform for the further visualization.

Imagine if I have a list of very big 3D models in one single project, If I send the full size models to the cloud, it will be (very slow?) impossible to interact and visualize in the cloud.
So I came up with this idea. If the objective is visualize the general feature of the models, point cloud could be a lot more light than 3D models. But I didn’t find a post yet that explains how to generate Point Cloud file from rhino 3D model. All the posts are talking about generate 3D model from point cloud file.

It’s a open topic, ideals are very welcome.

Have you got an example of a point cloud file you’d like to be using?

I’m guessing it will have some kind of formatting to it… It’s possible to generate a list of point data in any syntax by deconstructing the points and using the xyz values recombined into the required format.

For most of time, we want to make a 3D model based on Point Cloud file made by other people.
But now I would like to reverse this process. Make my own Point Cloud file based on a 3D model.

At this moment, I have one less smart solution

  1. deconstruct each volume into faces
  2. rebuild the surface
  3. get the control points
  4. collect all the points and remove duplicated points, convert points into point cloud and bake it

It is very slow and Rhino is not happy with this task :crazy_face:, despite the point cloud only has 0.2 million points.
I even got this unexpected error display

Point clouds are usually much bigger files than well modelled surfaces and polysurfaces, unless the point cloud is decimated heavily, at which point it may be unusable.

Can you be more specific about the application?

Control points don’t necessarily lie on the surfaces they define. Better to scatter some points on each surface.

Yes, the propose is for the project management. The workflow is to send 3D revit model to Revizto and make interactive visualization.

For example,
on May 2021, we are building the A01 A02 appartement
on July 2022, we finished A01 A02, and we are working on A03 appartement.

Because the project contains many buildings, the current solution is only make a 3D volume but it’s difficult to understand which appartement it belongs to. (Maybe I attach facade screenshot to the volume ?)
If I upload all the 3D model, it is even not possible to open the project in the cloud. So I was thinking about Point Cloud because I can easily control the file size with a moving bar.

Cloud Compare has a function to generate a point cloud from an imported mesh.
Its free … if it works you could make a donation to the developer.
image

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Create a mesh from the volume and extract the points, use cull point with the required distance to reduce the point count. Checking a point for inclusion in a brep always slowed things down for me

Yes, it works. I also found another way which is very easy.

With Recap Photo, I just need to import the model, and export it with .pts format. It also provides an option to control the density of the point.