ply export

[olihar]

I am wondering is it possible to export only the points with color in for example ply or just raw txt format from Photoscan, I can only export to ply including faces. As well the file is in binary, so I have to open it in meshlab for example and save as ASCII, edit in text editor and then I have a clean vertex only file. However problem is what if you have million or even billions of points, Meshlab has a hard time opening it.

Therefore I would love an output that only outputs like so. for example a ply file. x, y, z, normals and color.

property float x
property float y
property float z
property float nx
property float ny
property float nz
property uchar red
property uchar green
property uchar blue
property uchar alpha


alpha is of course extra and does not have to be there.

I cant imagine this being hard to implement, or maybe I am missing something and it is already there.

I am thinking this because it can often be easier to visualize billions of points then 100 million faces.

P.s. I am actually wondering about the reconstruction process as well, when the GPU step has finished does that not indeed return a simple point cloud data? could then the last steps be skipped if one would only be after the point cloud data, or... that data could be processed a little later, to brake down the reconstruction steps.

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello olihar,

Have you already tried Export Points command form file menu? In PhotoScan 0.8.5 it is now possible to export Dense Point cloud (the queality parameter should be set do different to "point cloud" value), but this kind of export requires depth maps reconstruction and will take some time depending on quality selected.

[olihar]

ok, so I just tried this... why does it have to reconstruct the model again? As I just finished a model on high inside the program, then I wanted to have a look at the point cloud in high setting, but exporting point cloud on high has to rebuild the whole model again... Would it not be possible to use the already processed data.