what use are point normals in LiDAR scan data?

[ALFRED_ST_MEDIA]

So....I have a TON of lidar data to think of new and interesting ways to render. Millions (20M+ ) points I'm bringing in as particles.

each point has TX TY and TZ, some have R G and B, and all seem to have a normal vector Nx Ny Nz. The normal is based on the surface it was scanned on, which could be really cool, but I can't see how to address the point's normals in VRay.

Any suggestions?

-ctj

[vlado]

You could use it as explicit normal map in a VRayMtl material, though it might require some imtermediate nodes to move the normals to the proper normal map range.

Best regards,
Vlado

[danwnewlands]

Hey mate,

Out of interest, how do you get the point data into Maya? We deal with Lidar a lot, usually I mesh the data and create a GPU cache to use it nicely. Would be good to have the point data in Maya, 3dsMax has a very good point loader which works extremely well for this, but not Maya.

Thanks,

Dan

[jasonhuang1115]

Hey mate,

Out of interest, how do you get the point data into Maya? We deal with Lidar a lot, usually I mesh the data and create a GPU cache to use it nicely. Would be good to have the point data in Maya, 3dsMax has a very good point loader which works extremely well for this, but not Maya.

Thanks,

Dan

I have the same question.

[FSGFX]

maybe you find partio usefull...
http://redpawfx.github.io/partio/

[danwnewlands]

Yea I used to use this but it really struggles when getting into the millions of points. I was wondering if there was something new ive missed that may have some extra features or smarter way of caching the data. Thanks though dude

[FSGFX]

the only other software i know would be sequoia..
http://sequoia.thinkboxsoftware.com/...989.1478610237