Blender Plugin: Point Cloud Display For the Blender Viewport

zicklag · May 2

Hey folks! I just finished a tiny blender plugin that can render point clouds in the viewport: Point Cloud Display!

I was really surprised that this functionality wasn't built-in to blender, and that the only up-to-date option plugin cost $70. This plugin is super-simple and easy to use. Any mesh object with vertices and a color attribute can be displayed as points with a configurable point size.

For my project, I'm using colmap to capture point clouds to use as reference for an IFC model created with BlenderBIM. Previously I had to create a poisson mesh of the point cloud to visualize in Blender, but that made many thin objects like pipes, wires, etc. very difficult to see or completely invisible, and the way that it would fill space between sparse points wasn't very indicative of certain parts of the scan.

The environment I'm scanning is hard to light well, because it's a crawlspace, so conditions aren't favorable for high-quality scans, so being able to visualize the semi-sparse point cloud in Blender will help a lot.

I hope others might find it useful!