dayvbrown Posted August 13, 2012 Share Posted August 13, 2012 Hi all, Just wondering what people use to get lidar data into a usable format for houdini. Ideally of course we'd like a useful mesh in the end but just getting it from .pts format to another point cloud format would be a good start... we have .pts, .fws (which apparently contains some additional wrapper data?), and .fls (which are MUCH smaller). Any thoughts? Cheers, Dave. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dayvbrown Posted August 13, 2012 Author Share Posted August 13, 2012 I have looked into meshlab but it's been fairly crashtacular up to this point... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted August 13, 2012 Share Posted August 13, 2012 Do a "head" of your .pts file. Is it ASCII? If it is, how does the first few lines look like? Quick Google: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted August 13, 2012 Share Posted August 13, 2012 http://sourceforge.n...2/topic/3826846 This looks like worth giving a try since Houdini supports .PLY files. Once you have a .ply file, you can also use the standalone gply utility to convert to .bgeo. I could not find a solution on this issue anywhere so I will post my fix for the issue. Leica PTS files consist of X,Y,Z,I,R,G,B for each point but when importing the data into Meshlab the program crashes. So I use a text editior such as gVim to open LARGE PTS files quickly and then add the following header lines. ply format ascii 1.0 element vertex PLEASE COPY THE FIRST LINE OF THE PTS FILE AND PLACE HERE SHOULD BE THE POINT COUNT property float x property float y property float z property uchar intensity property uchar red property uchar green property uchar blue end_header Then simply save the file as a .ply ...import and now you have all the colors from your registered pointcloud. To clarify what fwfa is saying, this is the number of points in the point cloud. The first line of the Leica PTS file is the count. Example: element vertex 10046103 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dayvbrown Posted August 13, 2012 Author Share Posted August 13, 2012 (edited) Aha!! This is the missing ingredient, was going through the lastools and was managing to seriously compress the files but I reckon that looks good. Awesome dude thanks, life saver. Dave. Edited August 13, 2012 by dayvbrown Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craiglhoffman Posted October 17, 2013 Share Posted October 17, 2013 I know this is an old thread, but thought I would add to the knowledge base. I got .xyz Lidar data in through CHOPs. I renamed the file to be ".chan" (probably didn't need to do that..) and read it in a File CHOP. The file had a million points of 7 columns of data (position, color, and some reflectance value) and I used the rename CHOP to rename the first three to tx, ty, tz, and the next three to CR, CG, and CB. I then made a line with the same number of points as the File Read CHOP (using expression), deleted the geo (keeping the points) with the Add SOP and then applied the CHOP positions and color to the points using the Channel SOP. There is a tutorial somewhere online that shows the expressions that I emulated. It worked out well and I didn't have to do any format changes, so if you have an ASCII file with simple rows and columns of data this is doable in Houdini using this method. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eetu Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 Did you try Table Import SOP, sounds like it could do the trick? http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.5/nodes/sop/tableimport Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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