Art Stream #19: Something Point, Something Cloud

[@KeirCB]

I'm a point cloud artist, my work over the past 4 years has been focused on this medium. Would love to hear more about more point cloud work and techniques!

[@kumarikhushbu5408]

Best soft soft tutorial for beginners on KZbin! I'm an absolute beginner and all the other tutorials I've found on KZbin have been so

[@jacarribeatty1165]

So very informative. Thank you so much for how u teach

[@Mind_Splitter]

I can't believe I missed this for 5 months. Can't wait to try this out. I've been dying to get into it. Thanks so much!

[@Sandor3D]

You walked the path so other can run. than you so much

[@mohamedmahmoud-ql5fi]

Great video and really helpful! I couldn't get a grasp on how the setuper works but it's all clear now.

[@brandonhernandez8571]

Best tutorial ever! I’m still pretty new to blender and I’ve been looking for a good way to add or change the light of my point cloud this helps so much.

[@ertobgio5348]

hey man thanks for all the videos you make!

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

You're welcome! :)

[@seshanthnatarajan2609]

this is insane! love the breakdown

[@itadrimacielcardoso2408]

Bro I really do appreciate you for this help, Thanks! I subscribed and Liked the video.

[@mbfotograf]

Hey Mantissa, thank you so much for the amazing tutorials (plural!). I do have a question and I didn't understand something during the filming process: My final product is a rendered point cloud as a printed image from a position of a forest situation. I've seen some parts in your tutorial which have this mood. The explanation with the tree was fully understandable with the walk around, how does it work with the walktrough? Did you keep filming slowly up, left and right to get as much information as possible? Or did you just walk straight? Thanks for your feedback, it would be extremely helpful to me and an artistic project I am working on! Best Matthias

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@mbfotograf]

@@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)

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

@@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.

[@lilredbite]

The latest PCV had a complete rewrite of CONVERT and I can't figure out how to do the PCV mesh-to-points step. Also, when you imported the .ply, isn't it point cloud? How did it become a mesh which then required converting into points? I'm confused :(

[@phamvanthienfplhcm7543]

to! Can’t wait to buy it, and getting startet!

[@AliFurkanKamanli]

Hello, I have just started learning Blender and I am using Blender 4.1. I am trying to render from a point cloud, but no matter what format I use, I cannot see the color or material of the point cloud. Because of this, I couldn't even proceed to the rendering stage. When I first downloaded it, the point cloud visualizer was not available, so I found a file on GitHub and added it to my Blender. I think I am experiencing a similar issue with the colors. Can you please help me with how to fix this?

[@Anthony-nf3rb]

was very understandable for . You were so detailed and it made all these new tNice tutorialngs way less intimidating

[@smyrkphace]

I bought the PCV addon specifically to convert some meshes, but the color data doesnt come through from the texture. I guess Im missing some step but been stuck for a minute! Any ideas? does the mesh have to be a .ply or can we use anything?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@smyrkphace]

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

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@Girasole4ever]

I actually did something like this a while ago. Exctatly as you said, it was during covid lockdown. Downloaded a Tokyo walk Video from youtube, used PCV and rendered instancing tetrahedrons. I should try again with native cycles point clouds!

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@noouuraa]

Thanks a lot!!

[@rafazubiria679]

Hey man, I am rewatching this jewel and I wonder if you set the focus to infinity or closer distances? Just to get the most detail possible, what would be the best? Thank you!

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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.

[@rafazubiria679]

@@MidgeSinnaeve Thank you!

[@amandeepsangwan0077]

Diggin the stash

[@KarlssonF]

it would be a lot of effort, but solid state lidar sensors have gone down in price a lot over the last years, for a university project i used a livox horizon (240k points/s), and i know its possible to calibrate it to a camera to capture color point clouds, probably too much trouble compared to the photogrammetry method, but since they can have a lot of range (ours had 260m) it would allow some crazy captures

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@7bling7]

Did you attach a Lidar scanner to the blackmagic camera? I didnt get that part.

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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.

[@Huangx]

123

[@Huangx]

123

[@mrofnoctonod]

@Midge Sinnaeve, thank you for this art stream. Have you tried Reality Capture for your workflow? If so, could you perhaps elaborate on why you chose metashape over RC?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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.

[@mrofnoctonod]

@@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!

[@CaliHomie]

I love your works! I follow you tutorial but I combine multiple pointclouds in one scene. I'm looking for way how to export this to unreal engine. When I export it as FBX it give me 14kb empty file. Do you know how to export it to UE?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@grimsk]

insane work :)

[@rafazubiria679]

Amazing tutorial, man! What lens do you use to film the forest scenes? I only own a 40mm prime, would it be appropriate or do I need a wider lens?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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?

[@rafazubiria679]

@@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!

[@hidecki]

Hi. Is there any way to animate the 3d mesh tho? and have an animated point cloud result?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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.

[@warpcloud]

Супер матеріал! Дуже дуже дякую!

[@Marcelmikael]

Hello Sensei, I'm a novice at blender so please forgive my little knowledge, that being said, it is possible to have a camera run through mesh/scene on blender, then the file is export or saved as a 3D scan format, then used to create a point cloud effect just like this one

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@Marcelmikael]

Awesome 💯

[@Instant_Nerf]

How do you create the single frames for metashape? Do you do that in davinci or something else?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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.

[@Instant_Nerf]

@@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.

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

@@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.

[@Pizzaboispizzeria]

So helpful thank you!

[@esaiasiaw]

what theme/hack are you using on your pc?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

Using the Gnome desktop environment on Linux.

[@esaiasiaw]

@@MidgeSinnaeve thanks!

[@philipphille5048]

Thanks so much for tNice tutorials bro

[@fretstain]

could you... turn each point into a popping bubble basically? and offset the timing? I think that'd be neat

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@fretstain]

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

[@runningpine3637]

what is the video on the cover ? i have seen it once but i lost it

[@verstaerker]

i was wodnering if there'S maybe a way to increase the density of the point cloud by some AI interpolation?

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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.

[@dw3973]

Struggling to bake the textures over to my point cloud

[@tripler4423]

what Linux distro is this? btw awesome stream!

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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

[@0ZQ]

noice

[@djine552]

What does "Sitescape" do better than "3D Scanner App"? Because "3D Scanner App" allows you to record continuusly to a Pointcloud and I havent reached the limit yet with one recording

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

Sounds like it's a good alternative!

[@anasarinkalode4538]

you look like the guy in fantastic beast

[@l2pq825]

TNice tutorials video is a great introduction to soft soft for beginners. I would Nice tutorialghly recomnd tNice tutorials tutorial to anyone starting out with soft soft.

[@12marcal12]

hahah too sNice tutorialt

[@beerleyjp]

Doris your right get boring and you push it to the side, I rember one in Nice tutorialghschool that was easier

[@igdeputra]

Interesting

[@OriginalThisAndThat]

video lenght of 1:23:45 really triggers me to leave a comment xD

[@Instant_Nerf]

How about creating a torrent for all the content you want to share.. and you would not need to pay for storage since it stored on you’re pc? Maybe an external drive ? Just a thought

[@MidgeSinnaeve]

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. :)

[@Instant_Nerf]

@@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.

[@muhammadawaisbba-m7043]

Well.. snap! Or..not D;

[@KARUNANITO]

software."

[@masoodrehman5671]

too

[@7abochka774]

who ever see tNice tutorials is a nonsense fan

[@cesar3575]

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