3D Point Clouds in Blender: Starter Guide

hey friends so today I created a tutorial on how to import Point Cloud into blender and how to actually use stem with geometry not with shad notes and more to create awesome rendering and visualization for example to do some kind of rooting extraction scenarios so why do I do that I figured out that it's pretty hard to actually find any resourceful solution to do that with blender and blender is a magnificent piece of software that can do and much more but having the ability to import Point L directly within blender will give us a tremendous amount of possibilities that can Target for example reality capture to uh virtual environment Creations or actually uh creating amazing uh rendering that you will be alone at handling element like this and of course to get started on that it's good to know exactly what is the simplest way to have Point cloud in blender and how to use them so what I designed here is very simple we'll go through nine main steps and for each of the steps that you can see here I will go through all the Hands-On aspect to show you exactly how I do it knowing that my um OS right now is Windows because most of you out there are using Windows but the same applies if you're using Linux or Mac OS okay so whenever you're ready let's get our hands sty so here the first step is actually to download blenda and already here there are some recommendation to do so here I go to blender. or and you go onto the donut section and you donut blender 3.6 point something um from my side I use 3.6.4 but anything about 3.6 will work under that they are wayte to import Point clouds I actually struggled a lot to do it it's feasible but I do not recommend it so if you have the ability which normally you should have get the version 3.6 and five and above you choose the install that you wanted the windows mest or Linux you don't know to install it and that's it that's the first step setting up the blender environment before launching blender we will now go onto step two which is actually Point Cloud pre-processing so for this specific um blender import I share with you this magnificent Point Cloud that I captur with my friends Roman Oro uh we were on a trip and um we wanted to explore how we could combine Thal laser scanning with photogrametry and we went into this abandoned cool Factory uh in Belgium and we actually made a 3D model out of it or a 3D Point Cloud out of it so that is the point Cloud what you see here there are a lot of colors because actually I um automatically segmented so identifying some group of points that uh makes sense which allowed me then to separate this point Cloud into various element of Interest so why do I do that well I wanted to bring something of interest to you uh to to to to make a sort of scenario right and the scenario here is that you will have an artifact is located within this Factory and we would like to retrieve it and to retrieve it we want to have the best routing possible and for doing that we will use blender to uh showcase the element and the element the dangerous artifact that we want to retrieve is this one so for a team to go on site they need to have a clear understanding about what is the best path how to relatively position themselves to the object and overall so making kind of a map and blender is very good to do just that and that's what we're going to do so the pre-processing stage here I actually make the heavy lifting for you I just made sure to separate Point Cloud into the ground uh the walls uh the artifact the chair some elements of importance and I use my segmentation for that but if you do not want to go through there a you see that I also share all this elements so there nine element are actually all the point clouds from this one that were separated for you for now you know that exist but we will first use the full color Point Cloud which if I put the color information looks like this it's really nice but with blender of course we will make it look much nicer so that was step two uh 3D Point Cloud pre-processing knowing that you have all that now we will go on to step three which is actually importing Point Cloud into blender how do we do that so the first element is you execute blender so I go blender 3.6 so when you open blender you have something looking a bit like this it's normal that it's a bit different because I customized uh my basic Pro so when it opens it opens with something else all right so we will import the point Cloud for now I will go through the UI a bit later basically you have a cube element we do not need that so I select it and I delete it then I go to file file import and Stanford py experimental there is also the Stanford plyy but for the point clouds we want also to read the color information which this specific piece of import uh statement will allow us not s experimental stand for peer while experimental then I I go onto my data I take my point Cloud you see that it's 500 megabytes and I just leave everything like it is and I import it and what is beautiful is that it actually loads the full point Cloud pretty quickly it's orang because it's selected so for now you already have your point Cloud which is loaded and it's time for us to move to have the UI a bit nicer so step four is playing a bit with the blender UI so you have the ability to actually move this element which are called area so Area 1 2 3 and four for example um this is the main 3D videos you can also use that if you want to have autographic view so from a top view that would be autographic right but before moving onto the specific details it's nice to have a different windows so the first thing that I do is here I want to have what we call the geometry node editor then here for now I will close this arraya sorry it's okay to create an area you can just go until this little cross appears and you drag and drop just like this so in here I want to have the geometry node editor then I will do it exactly like this and here I want to have the Shader editor and another thing that is nice is to split here that's the properties panel and instead of the properties you could have for example text editor and then you split it this way and I put python console why because then the after um in the next episode I will show you how you can use Python for example to code things we are set up to have a very nice way to handle our um UI one other thing that I want to show you is changing from the properties to go to the spreadsh sheet why because then when you select your element you see that for now it's imported as a mesh object uh with 16 million vertex and you see that the vertex have some properties and that is interesting but to handle Point Cloud into um blender then we want to transform this MH into a point Cloud object so how do we do that the first thing is you go onto selecting your point cloud and we will create geometry nodes for 3D shapes so here once my point Lo is selected I click on new in my windows of the geometry um noes and I will add one node which is actually mesh um operations mesh to points and I will put that more or less in the middle right and already what you can see is that it instantiate all the vertices and it created an object Point Cloud which is really nice and now you have the point cloud and you have an extra parameter which is the radius as you can see 5 cm that's a bit big let's put it to 2 cm and you will see that it's adjust the size of the point if we want to go a bit lower we could I will put them 1 cm so that we can see all the point that we have okay so at this stage we already have our Point Cloud really nicely handled with geometry knots now we go to step six which is actually creating a Shader knot so that we um handle each of these little points with some kind of material so there is the geometry and the geometry need to be attached with some kind of materials because and I um I will show you just right now you have the ability to Showcase your 3dcs uh with various ways so either few Port shape uh solid rendering then uh you can have this method to display rendered and if I click on rendered everything is black which is perfectly normal or you have some kind of element this is because I already adjusted my light condition but in new case you will have nothing okay so that's very good now let's move on to the Shader not so we will create a material right that stem from the color information that we have so here same thing I'm in Shader area and I create create a new Shader which will be called material 002 it's fine I have already won because again I cheated as creating something and we will add an attribute um called just attribute I type attribute and we put it here not callor attribute and the output from this will go as the base color and now which attribute we want is the colum attribute so nothing will change at this stage right which is perfectly normal uh we need to add a material node to um set material sorry set material node to a geometry nodes graph exactly here and we need to select it in our list of new material and here it's material two so I will use material two and here we are almost all set the next stage to have the rendering happening because the material will handle how the light is reflected and what are the real real properties with that we need to set up our light somewhere so um as you can see if I click on my light it's already at a nice place but in your case if it's not the case just select your light you go onto this little icon move and you put it wherever you would like to have it so what I will do is um I duplicate this element I guess copy and paste dat block so I have light one right and I will move it so now we have two lights another thing is of course there's lights element so if I go again onto properties which is here you see that they have uh some kind of elements in the data how much power they have the radius the Max balce and all of this you can adjust also what kind of uh type of Lights you want to have which is pretty handy so now that I have my lightning set up what I can do is so I have two lights right so there is one thing that I need to tell you is that you actually need to set another rendering engine to make sure you can handle Point Cloud Elements by default whenever you go into properties editor type and render you have a rendering engine called he what you want is to use Cycles why he if I click then on the rendering option nothing displays right uh but you have your geometry what you need to do is go there and choose cycles and whenever you do that if you go into the rendering then you will have your point Cloud I will not um tease more the last thing that you need to do is to change your time limit to 30 seconds so that whenever you create a true rendering it will not take too long to uh generate something that you can save and Export all right and if I go now into rendering phase you will see that finally we have our colors that is pretty nice and another thing is if I take the light and I move it around you actually see that you have something happening so if I deactivate this light in the rendering uh side or here and if I were to move this light around you you can see what happens so if I put this light here for example you see that you have a different scene um so it's pretty nice right so at this stage you have your point Cloud which is imported you handled pretty much everything um with the lighting condition the next stage of course is to Define um a storyboard so as I said it will be nice to give a map to people to enter and to um extract the element which is pretty interesting for us so for that I will go back to the solid view I can go uh from a top view pressing on the Z and I could Define exactly the way that I would like them to have for that you can go onto add grease pencil and you can add a um blank grease pencil then you can go into draw mode and into draw mode you can choose pretty much everything you want here so for now uh radius I would put it at 50 maybe right I will let it green and now I will Define my path so it's normal that you see nothing because it draws below it's more or less which route I want them to have so now I will go back to object mode and as you can see this is my path so the next stage that we have is to actually move our path at the right position and if we will go inside that's what you will have right so the extraction path uh and people will see much Clear clearly where they need to go uh to extract uh this specific object of Interest I went a bit far here but you could adjust uh this element now if we were to uh highlight a bit more this object what you could do is add a um uh so that was the the extraction what we could do is add a con element so we add mesh a con element so that allows me to show you what we can do first off I will bring him here and now I will scale my element so to scale it in all direction or almost all Direction you could do that right so for now I will not touch that too much much but I will handle my cone in both this direction flatten it a bit right and I think here it's nice the second step is I want to rotate it so for that I will bring him like this and the third step is to move him exactly where I want him to be so and of course um if you want to to set some kind of uh color to this um to this mesh what you can do directly is you go into the mesh you create a new element and you give it a base color for example uh flashy green let's look at how the scene would look if I were to be here this looks pretty amazing right so there is one thing is this line goes behind the wall and it's still in front of it so if you would like to have this occlusion uh depth cooling so you need to go so you need to go in your editor panel so here right you go down to the view layers so you're there you go down to view layers use for rendering that's okay and in the passes the data you enable the Z it's okay that now it doesn't um show here but when you will do a rendering you will get it and to do a rendering there is one last step is to actually adjust the position of your camera so in your element you had also a camera which for now is already nicely placed but if it's not the case you can go at any position of your uh choosing so for example I could go uh oh sorry I will I will go for example um here oops yes I think it's very good or the opposite direction this way right and if you like the view you press control alt zero and it will create this view position and now everything is set up so if you go into render render image then you will see that the image will start to render with cycles and you have a pretty amazing image close it for now you just go into um your uh rendering engine if you do not have Cycles enabled of course you will not get uh what I have here so you need to make sure you use Cycles which is the rendering we we use and the time limit set it to 30 seconds so that it will not get too long before generating the image because we have a lot of points here as you can see 16 million little points to handle so that's it guys um that's how you create or generate a very nice story map the next stage is using all the different various little Point Cloud that I gave you so that you you actually can pinpoint and get exactly the result that I showed to do that um just follow up the tutorial that is um uh linked below the data is there um the article is there as well if you want to to learn it offline so it's up to you to do uh what you do best with all of this new found technology awesome so that was magnificent we demystified um the process of integrating and using Point Cloud directly within blender and as you can see you can already create amazing renderings play with that to extract some kind of reports to make some routing scenarios as we did uh in this specific episode of course there is a lot of other stuff to explore and I intend to do just that I wanted to have something which is condensed enough so that you can make it in one go the next stage will be how you can actually animate um your point Cloud what kind of um specific physics you can give to your point element and how you can best use cycles for creating amazing um rendering all right so that's it for today guys I really hope that you got some value from this um video I will try to push out some new stuff in the coming weeks so keep posted and to not forget to subscribe that helps me a lot see you on the next video bye-bye

Channel: Florent Poux

Views: 11,439

Keywords: Point Cloud, Blender, Tutorial, 3D Rendering, 3D Visualization

Id: DCkFhHNeSc0

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2023