Abhishek,
To expand on that, BRL-CAD’s point cloud primitive was implemented years ago
for a specific short-term need (a relatively straight-forward scanned point
visualization). The pnts primitive was added with some structure flexibility
and input methods but never taken to general feature and isn’t considered a
published feature (which means it can change as needed).
Design-wise, in my view it’s one of the few entities in BRL-CAD that can
validly be solid or non-solid, intentionally supporting points with or without
volume. The on-disk definition was also set up to support per-point
orientation (e.g., surface normals) and color, data typically available from
scanners. And that’s about where things were left, but the possibilities are
wide open.
Integrating with PCL would be good with an appropriate plan — especially if it
helps get to production-quality capability being able to import, display, and
render massive point clouds with/without colors, radii, and orientation. From
there, one of the more useful things to explore would be Smooth Signed Distance
(SSD) surface reconstruction. That could provide a robust path for fixing
broken mesh geometries.
Cheers!
Sean
> On Mar 11, 2018, at 9:22 PM, Abhishek Vasudevan <abhishek.open...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Daniel,
> I was thinking maybe I could integrate the pnts primitive with
> the PCL library to help with the visualization part. I believe a lot of point
> cloud functionalities (Segmentation, filters) can be added easily if we were
> to use PCL. Also, there can be options to open and operate on all formats of
> point cloud files like PCD, PLY ,etc.
>
> Can you provide me the code/documentation that BRL-CAD uses for the pnts
> primitive? Also, what do you think about using PCL here?
>
> Regards,
> Abhishek
>
>
>> On Mar 11, 2018, at 1:10 AM, Daniel Roßberg <danielmrossb...@gmail.com
>> <mailto:danielmrossb...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Abhishek,
>>
>> I'm sure there are many ways you can contribute here.
>> I've just looked for the first time at our pnts primitive (beside a small
>> fix for a compiler I made there 9 years ago). I think this was meant with
>> "BRL-CAD has a basic point cloud primitive." And as far as I can see, it
>> has no real functionality yet. Especially, the pnts primitive doesn't
>> describe a 3D solid, which is a problem for a software designed to handle 3D
>> solids. The pnts primitive sketches currently an idea of how a point cloud
>> could be handled in BRL-CAD. E.g., it provides the necessary load and save
>> functions and the hooks into the mged and archer GUIs. This should ease the
>> implementation of the real 3D functionality because you don't need to
>> struggle with this much any more.
>>
>> Therefore, if you have an idea of how to bring pnts to live you are welcome.
>> Feel free to discuss it here. Point clouds are often the result from 3D
>> scans and a matter of visualization which we want to have in BRL-CAD too.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Daniel
>>
>> 2018-03-09 14:14 GMT+01:00 Abhishek Vasudevan <abhishek.open...@gmail.com
>> <mailto:abhishek.open...@gmail.com>>:
>> Hey guys,
>> I am a final year undergrad student from India majoring in Information
>> Technology. I am currently in Australia as a research student at the
>> University of Melbourne as part of an exchange program. I am working on
>> point clouds as part of my research here. I’ve learnt quite a lot about
>> point clouds, their file formats (PLY, PCD, etc.) and also the Point Cloud
>> Library (PCL).
>>
>> I’ve seen the GSoc ideas page and apparently BRL-CAD has a primitive
>> implementation of point clouds. Is there any documentation on how to use
>> this in BRL-CAD? Also, what ideas do you have mind in improving the
>> performance of your point cloud model?
>>
>> I have programmed extensively in C,C++ and Python. Is there any way I can
>> make a contribution here?
>>
>> Warm regards,
>> Abhishek
>>
>>
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