FMP: August 3/3

P
U
F

Project

Over the couple of weeks I have been thinking about the implermation of point clouds or at least the idea of point clouds, the reason being that over time when the scene changes I want the environment to become point clouds referencing Marshmallow laser feast ‘In the eyes of the animal’ where they use point cloud data from the forest to simulate what animals see and behave.

I came across multiple problems first being that I didn’t have a device that would capture Lidar point cloud data, second creating point cloud data from 3D models that is not 3D scanned would also be difficult to convert and lastly, creating point cloud via VFX is cautions a lot of performances problems such as glitches. I will unpack the how I fixed theses problems, my thoughts and final outcome.

Problem #1: Lidar Point Cloud

I thought that capturing point cloud data via my own devices would be good enough for collecting data, however I quickly understood that it would not be possible as my deceives did not have that component to perform those data. So next though process is to use 3D model data to convert the mesh data into individual mesh data.

Problem #2: 3D model to point cloud

Then that was also a bust in terms that it would need other softwires to achieves the 3D model to point cloud data, they either needed a payment method to access or have a step learning process in which I didn’t have time. So I came across this video blow in which that was using unity’s VFX to achieving things that I wanted to do.

Problem #3: VFX

Using this tutorial below and exploring with VFX I was able to create point clouds using the 3D model data, the problem that occurred was performance as without being linked to an computer the point cloud would simply make the VR glitch, to resolve this solution I had to play with the particles numbers and size in order for the point cloud to be visible and yet work smoothly when not linked to a computer.

Point Cloud Test in VR

Result:

Here are screen capture of the final result of the VFX point cloud, my next step hopefully is to have the point clouds appear and animation but it would not be my biggest priority.