Art Stream #19: Something Point, Something Cloud 

You're welcome! :)

The resulting point cloud you get really depends on your camera path. If you circle around an object, you'll get a 360 view of it in your point cloud. If you walk a straight path, you'll just have the view from that path. I do that because I know I'm following a similar path with my CG camera so I can get away with it. You can have a look at a whole bunch of point clouds I've created here and use them for anything: archive.org/download/mantissa-pointclouds

@@MidgeSinnaeve Wow, thank you so much for your answer - I really appreciate it! I'll take a close look at this, I bought the Point Visualizer app and that's something. Unfortunately, certain settings are different like what you show here with Points from Mesh I can't see any rendering and vertices and exporting to Alembic in Blender doesn't work either/not progressing at all. I'm still looking for the right format, including the data size, in order to have fine points. I've been working with Metashape for a long time and need Blender as an intermediate step to transfer the Point Cloud to Cinema 4D and then make very large format prints, not animation. If you have another tip about this, I would be very happy and thanks again for your great tutorials and humor 🙂. (Ps: I work with a 3970 Threadripper, 128GB Ram and two RTX 5000)

@@mbfotografYou should be able to export a .ply file with your point cloud from Metashape and import that directly in to C4D? That's how I get it in to Blender / Houdini.

Nice, yeah there's so much footage on the internet you might be able to source!

I thought about renting that kind of equipment, but ended up going the phone route. Would still love to play with one of those though! :D

I stop down the aperture as far as I can to get maximum depth of field and then focus on the main subject I'm trying to capture.

@@MidgeSinnaeve Thank you!

I'm using .ply formatted point clouds that I'm importing in to Blender. To get the color from a mesh you would either copy the UV's or convert them to Vertex Colors. With PCV, you should be able to use Mesh Surface to generate points on the surface. Have you had a look at the documentation? It's pretty good: jakubuhlik.com/docs/pcv/docs.html

Hey man thx for reply! Author said it was a api change in new blender might have been janking things up, hes already released a new alpha! Ill try that.@@MidgeSinnaeve

@@smyrkphace Good to hear there's progress! Let me know how it worked out. :)

Of course, You could animate it with shape keys, modifiers of geometry nodes, to name just a few options. You want to animate it before the geometry nodes modifier though, so you're just affecting tje underlying vertices of the mesh. I've used modifiers a lot to animate some of these.

So that question kinda depends on your camera. On full frame, I think it might work, anything else I doubt it. My camera has a Super 35 / APS-C sensor and I've mostly been using a 14mm, so that would equal 21mm on Full Frame. I would honestly just give it a go and see what the results are. If you know someone that has a go pro or something similar, maybe try that as well?

@@MidgeSinnaeve Yes, I have a Sony A7sII and the 40mm seems to cover too little space in some scenarios, specially indoors and passageways. I am considering to pick a second hand Samyang 18mm. Thanks for your reply, it's been helpful!

In my case I used ffmpeg to extract frames as JPG's from a video I rendered out, Resolve can't do that directly, but other editing applications generally can.

@@MidgeSinnaeve thank you. Normally how do select the stills ? Is it 1 frame per second or every other frame ? How do you normally figure out what frames to extract. Thank you again. And yes I bought point cloud visual.. it’s really worth the price. It’s an amazing tool. I also have another plugin .. think it’s called photogrammetry.. but that one import 3 different formats of the pointcloud … which really slows down everything.

@@Instant_Nerf Really depends on you r computer, I generally extract every frame if the clip is 1 minute or less. But you can try every two or three frames as well. You might want to experiment with that to get to settings that work well for you.

I bought Metashape way back when and have been getting free updates ever since. RC was really expensive at that time in comparison, although I think that changed recently.

@@MidgeSinnaeve I hear you. RC was still expensive up until recently when Epic got involved. I think the PPI model is probably also off-putting to a lot of users no matter how cheap it is. From what I can gather after reading all over the web, RC is apparently very quick at creating the point cloud and mesh but when it's buggy, then it's buggy as heck, and then artists like to fall back on other tools like Metashape, Meshroom, etc. Thanks again for sharing, and for your reply. Stay amazing!

The addon I use can generate point clouds from meshes, so that could be an option.

Awesome 💯

There's an experimental plugin you can enable in unreal to load ply fies

For outdoors stuff, it's just the blackmagic camera filming, for indoor stuff I use an iPhone that has a lidar module. They're the Pro and Pro Max ones from the iPhone 12 and up. Some iPad Pro models have it as well, I think the M1 and M2 versions.

123

123

The time offset would be the tricky thing, but why not I guess. :)

@@MidgeSinnaeve haha I'd be so stoked if you tried that out. Hopefully it'd be a fun effect.

I've been using Void Linux for the past few years.

Using the Gnome desktop environment on Linux.

@@MidgeSinnaeve thanks!

Sounds like it's a good alternative!

Probably, but haven't looked in to it. The app I use has options of how dense you want it though, and you could always double back over an area to get more points as well.

Yeah, I've been toying with that idea as well, but then it's hard to add new files if I scan more stuff in the future. :)

@@MidgeSinnaeve well since you have over 100 go to begin with .. that would be a torrent. And if you organize and upload regularly and not let it pile up again to over 100 gb 🤣… it should be easy and free to find a hosting site that you can upload up to 3,5 gb free .. because it’s not that big to begin with.. and doable. But I shouldn’t be offering advice about organizing.. good lord my desktop is a desktop within a desktop🤣 good luck with whatever you end up doing tho.