How to visualize and programmatically work with huge point cloud

Question

I have created a quite large point cloud with about 800M RGB points. The exported .ply file is about 12GB large. The commercial software I used to create it can render the cloud very smoothly on my Ryzen 1800X/64GB/Geforce 1080Ti.

Now, I would like to work with this point cloud - programmatically put trajectories into it, combine multiple clouds, have more control over the point size ... Expectedly, using PyntCloud in a Jupyter Notebook failed miserably :)

Before I start learning something like Unity, are there any better suggestions? Potree maybe? Due to my lack of experience, I cannot judge yet where I would have which possibilities for working with the data.

Answer 1

Depends how 'deep' you want to go.

With Unity/Unreal doesn't have to be 'programatically' - they do have GUI, you can just load your data with few button clicks. Potentially you could parse/convert your data to readable format obj might be easiest with for eg. python.

So not sure what programming language you have in mind but as you are mentioning some python modules I guess python.

Then you could display it in many different ways.

• OpenGL (there are many Python bindings over the internet, check them out and choose one that suits you best)

• Matplot, pygraph and similar also have an ability to plot in 3D

• explore pandas as it is a great python library to deal with this types of datas

And for eg. you could put it all together inside a QT