reading point colors from .ply files

[motionprojects]

I have a .ply file that I am importing into a geometry node. The .ply format content is a point cloud with color information.

The points import and display. I also get 3 point attributes: diffuse_red[1], diffuse_green[1], diffuse_blue[1]

In details view I can see healthy numbers in those point attributes.

In a point sop I tried: add color $DIFFUSE_RED I get 'unable to evaulate expression'

My first thought is perhaps these point attributes from the import only look like floats but are really strings.

I've tried some hscript expressions using atof, point, and eval... no go, either I'm tripping up in syntactical errors or I'm barking up the wrong tree.

I'm just trying to map these attributes to point colors so I can see them in the viewport.

Thanks for any assistance.

[anim]

easiest way is to use VOP SOP to combine your attributes to color (Cd)

see example file

or you can use Attribute Create to initialize variables for your existing attributes

fill in name: diffuse_red

local variable: DIFFUSE_RED (or any)

and uncheck Write Values parameter to just initialize the variable and not overwrite attribute's value

now you can use that variable in Point SOP for example

color_points.hip

[bhaveshpandey]

I'm not sure if accessing data from a .ply file would be an optimised solution. How about converting your .ply to .bgeo using Houdini's gconvert utility??

Then you could get the attribs as per Tomas's suggestion.

Edited July 24, 2011 by bhaveshpandey