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Welcome to the dnPtcViewerNode wiki!

An Autodesk Maya locator to visualize point clouds generated by Pixar’s PhotoRealistic RenderMan.

Usage

1. Load the plugin.
   • Open the Plug-In Manager
   • Locate dnPtcViewerNode.so in the list.
   • Click the Load check box.
2. Create a node instance in your scene.
   • Type either in Maya’s Script Editor or Command Line :
     createNode -n ptcShape dnPtcViewerNode
3. Load a Point cloud and enjoy…

Reference

Point Cloud : Enter here the full path to your point cloud.

Name : Should be easy to figure out…
Points : If you have loaded only a percentage of the point cloud, you can check here how many point were loaded.
Channels : The number of channels doesn’t include positions, normals and radii.

Channels : Select the channel you want to see.
View As : Point samples can be displayed as Points, Circles or Disks. The size of Circles and disks correspond to the points’ radii.
Percent Loaded : You can choose to load only a fraction of the point cloud.
Point Size : This is a relative size influenced by the camera distance. Exposure ::Scales the displayed channel.
Invert : Useful for channels like occlusion.
Absolute Value : Useful when a channel contains negative values (which would appear black otherwise).
Smooth Points : Displays anti-aliased points.
Show Values : Displays the channel values as little labels for each and every point. THIS IS VERY SLOW: Only do that when you are using the crop box to scrutinize a handful of point.
Time Sync : If you loaded a file from a sequence, this will try to load the point cloud matching the current frame. Handy to flipbook pointcloud sequences. Make sure your playback is set to “Every Frame” in your prefs.

Filter Variable : You can filter out point based on their radius or channel value.
Filter Mode : Pick a filter here.

Crop Box : Loads only a portion of the point cloud for inspection (always at full resolution).

Show Normals : Displays normals. Normals are coloured to reflect their orientation.
Normal Scale : This works also when displaying normal or vector channels.
Negates Normal Color :: Make it easier to inspect normals with negative components.

Circle Slices : The number of segments used to draw circles.
Disk Slices : The number of segments used to draw disks.
Filter On : When using filtering, you can either choose to :
Filter on Load : The point cloud will be reloaded every time the filter parameters change, and only displayed points will be kept in memory.
Filter on Draw : All points will be kept in memory and filtering will only happen on draw events.

Tips

• To be able to visualize huge point clouds, the node will only store the currently visible channel. So, switching channels can be slow on huge point clouds.
  • To inspect a huge point cloud, try this :
    • Set ’’’Percent Loaded’’’ to 1% or lower.
    • Load your point cloud. You should get a fairly sparse display, good enough to locate an area of interest.
    • Change ’’’Crop Box Min’’’ and ’’’Crop Box Max’’’ to limit the zone you want to inspect.
    • Click ’’’Use Crop Box’’’ to load that zone at full resolution.
• Use the ’’’f’’’ key to frame the point cloud in maya :
  • The node uses the point cloud’s bounding box as the locator’s bounding box.
  • In Crop Box mode, pressing ’’’f’’’ will frame the crop box, not the global bounding box.

To Do

• Add manipulators to set the crop box.
• Output channel data for other nodes to use ( particles, etc )