Importing PLY binary point cloud

[diego6S3FN]

Hello,

I am trying to read binary point cloud .PLY files.

So far I have managed to load it in Arnold Procedural and when I activate Object Display Mode to Point Cloud then I can see it in the Viewport as shown in the screenshot but I can't get Arnold to render it, I have put the Arnold tag in point mode and I have tried different settings giving it the same settings I give to the particles but I can't get anything in the renderer.

The file is supposed to contain the position and colour of the points. I have attached the .PLY file and an image of how it should look like if anyone knows how to do it.

I have done this render in Arnold but importing .obj which now also supports vertexcolor, but it doesn't work for animation and the .obj files are very heavy 3 Gigabytes, at this level .PLY is much more efficient for animation.

The .ply file I have attached is low resolution because only files up to 2MB are allowed on ArnoldAnswer forum.

Conspiral_PLY_binary point cloud.ply.zip

Any help would be most welcome,

Cheers

Diego

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

The procedural does not read the content of the ply file as a points node, but as a polymesh with vertices only. That's why it can not be rendered as expected. Seems like a limitation to me.

Can you try to export the data to Alembic or USD?

[diego6S3FN]

Hi Peter, thanks for your answer, Yes I have seen that Procedural is indeed to read polygons and vertices, I have managed to export the file in PLY geometry, it is 3 times less memory than the Obj, Arnold can read the geometry perfectly with the advantage that it is not necessary to load the geo in C4D

What happens is that it can't read the Vertex Color.

I wonder if it would be possible to read the vertex colour info and copy it to a Vertex Color tag as Obj currently does or user_data_rgb

I have attached a small PLY file in case it an help to understand.

Cheers

DiegoCroisantalize_Colour_PLY.ply.zip