Textures from point cloud

[bmc130]

Is it possible or does anyone know a way of using the point cloud data for generating textures and so on. With the dense point cloud exported, would it be possible to use that for baking, albedo/diffuse, normal maps and so on to a low poly mesh?

I know 3dsmax 2015 can import point cloud data but it looks like its in a format that I cant get out from Agisoft.

I have some flat (very dense)  ground surfaces generated with Agisoft but it takes like 20 hours to generate a mesh and 8 hours to decimate it and still it doesnt look as detailed and nice as the dense cloud does, so I would like to skip the mesh generation step, if possible, since my main purpose is just to extract textures from the scan in the end.

[chrisd]

Perhaps its possible to export an orthophoto without building a mesh and texture? I'm only on Photoscan Standard so I don't have those options to test.

If that is not possible, PLY format encodes color info in the points (vertex color). If 3DSMax can read a PLY file with vertex color, you may be able to extract a texture from that.

Blender can can generate textures from vertex colors in a point cloud:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwbmLsYTeyU
http://blendersushi.blogspot.com/2012/03/basic-working-with-vertex-color.html
http://blendersushi.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/pipeline-import-vertex-color-solved.html

[mwillis]

Meshlab can bake the color data from a point or polygon to a texture using the PLY format.

[bmc130]

Hi mwillis, have you done it? Was thinking of how to do it in meshlab, can you transfer the point color data to a low resolution uv'ed mesh, like you would in 3dsmax or maya when baking textures?

[Kiesel]

Hi bmc130,

as Mark said, should be possible in Meshlab from PLY:
Go to FILTERS / SAMPLING / VERTEX ATTRIBUTE TRANSFER

Have a look at http://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~mcs112609/Meshlab%20Tutorial.pdf Page 43.

Karsten

[chrisd]

I did not get any useable textures when I tried to do this in Meshlab over a year ago. I never figured it out, then I saw the info on how to do it in Blender.

I had info from a different source, so perhaps the info in this tutorial will work better. Thanks for posting that.

[mwillis]

Chrisd, as Karsten says, this does work.  You can find a tutorial here:  https://vimeo.com/25071366

About 6 minutes in is where you need to pay extra attention.

Cheers!