[Feature Request] Can there be a generating point cloud only option? instead of generating the low quality mesh

[DeXtmL]

With the raw point cloud, we can use custom procedures to process the data to obtain higher-quality results. Currently, I take the mesh to blender and manually convert them to point clouds every time, feeling kinda unnecessarily convolved.

What do you think? Is that option possible?

[thygate]

if you don't care about the inpainted parts, why not use the simple mesh with occlusion, that takes only seconds to generate and you can delete the faces and use the vertices only.

[DeXtmL]

Two things:

1. It's not like i dont care about inpainted mesh; infact it's quite slow and often generates unrecognizable results. So usually , I just choose to render 2.5D point clouds. The advantage of point clouds is that you can clearly identify the missing information, whereas meshes hide the problem.
2. theoretically it should be as simple as deleting faces, but in reality it's not. Vertex representation and point clouds are usually treated differently in DCM apps. Take blender for example, if you delete faces, the vertex color CANNOT be preserved. Even if you managed to preserve the VC, vertices are not real point clouds, you need to further convert them.

[thygate]

The inpainting is slow yes, the simple mesh is very fast, have you tried that ?

Colors are stored per vertex in the exported formats (wavefront obj and ply), are you requesting another format ?

[DeXtmL]

"The inpainting is slow yes, the simple mesh is very fast, have you tried that ?" Yes, I am using the simple mesh. After obtaining the mesh, I have to manually convert them to point cloud.

What I am suggesting is that, because of the difficulties to obtain point clouds from the mesh (obj file), exporting real point clouds from this extension may be much easier, since it's readily having all the necessary data.

"Colors are stored per vertex in the exported formats (wavefront obj and ply), are you requesting another format ?" I don't see the option to choose formats,; anyway, ply is the right format. However, as I have stated before, I'm not quite sure if merely exporting vertices is the same as true point clouds like what you get from LIDAR scans (In many software, point clouds are represented by tree structure, whereas vertices are only lists). Perhaps there are special options in the ply exporter?