Hi
I'm having a hard time doing what should be fairly simple… i think

I have 50000 gridded points imported from a ascii .geo file which i made representing the surface of an earth. i can see the points and there is no primitives

I want to ideally make a 3D mesh and then colour it with a geo tiff

How can i make a 3D mesh from points only? or is there another way to colour points so it appears like one uniform layer

Thanks
Nick

Hi Nick,

You'll want to use an Add SOP. Go to the Polygons tab and select “By Group”. The Add SOP will try to connect all the points for you but whether it works or not depends on the point order. If you get a garbled mesh, you have to use a Sort SOP to reorder the points.

I remember there was a thread on the mailing list discussing about this. Please search through it and hope you find some tips or tricks.

Cheers!
steven

IsoOffset SOP can bring in point clouds. Copy Metaballs to the points then convert using MetaConvert.

Cheers,

Peter B

Thanks for the help!

i think the isooffset with the “point cloud” could be the one… however i can't get it to cook properly. The ray intersect and metaball seem to do something but it is not what i want.

Can someone tell me does the iso offset make something like contours?

I have attached a hip file…. hopefully will work

I have followed a bit of a tangent… instead of using metaballs as they chew heaps of memory and took ages even with only 1000 points (the actual file i want to apply this to has 500,000 point and could be more) I have used lines…. only to get primitives so the iso offset would do something. ideally the primitive would be a point but i don't think this is possible.

So to clarify, i want to make a simple earth like surface using the point from a file to map a geotiff to or lay an image on and for it to look like a contunous surface. NOTE that the Z is the elevation of the surface so iso lines/contours should be of Z.

Also the other idea i had would be to use “triangulate 2d” and the translate the p by the original values… however I can't make that work either.

Would Love some help or tips or resources to look at.

Cheers
Nick

Here's how you can do it using the Triangulate2D SOP.

Hey Ed
this is such a good way to make up tropology frompoint clouds out of matchmoving software,
spcifically for grounds.
beats pftracks auto mesh by a mile :-)
brian

Er, how do point clouds from matchmoving software look like? The Triangulate2D works for this case because we have points in essentially a 2D plane.

hey Ed

sorry for a late reply, but i didnt even see your question until today.

basically out of pftrack you can export a point cloud.

I scale the point cloud $TY = 0, then use this point cloud with the triangulate2d sop to generate a pretty cool representation for the ground, I then use the point sop to align the triangulated points back to their original position (basically removing the initial scale). i like this method because its quick and the geom is fairly neat.

In this case, I lowered the height of this surface and used this as the ground for the massive agents to walk on (ie sand), then I render this original surface as a matte, to give the impression that the agents feet and shins are in the grass.

heres a rough comp (without any rotos etc )we used as a proof of concept for something im working on now.
www.briangoodwinvfx.com/temp/crowd_In_grass_rough.mov

once again, sorry for the late reply

brian