Some Progress!

Well, I’ve made some progress of sorts.

In my last post I mentioned wanting to get a point cloud from NukeX (generated from a camera track) into Max’s new(ish) point cloud system. Well, the good news is that I’ve not got the point cloud – including colour data – from Nuke and into Max. The bad news is that it’s not using Max’s own point cloud system, as this requires a very particular format, the exact structure of which eludes me.

What I have done, courtesy of a smart idea from Dave Wortley, was to bring it into Max using Thinkbox’s PRT Loader, which can be grabbed as part of the Krakatoa demo. Krakatoa’s great and I advise you all take a look, but if you don’t want to make the investment in buying it just yet, the demo supports all the PRT Loading your body (and RAM) can handle, including what we need.

The actual process involves running a Python script inside NukeX with the required Point Cloud node selected. It’ll spit out a .csv file which can be loaded into the PRT Loader (and if you create the PRT Loader at the origin, its location will match up perfectly with any cameras you WriteGeo out from Nuke using .fbx format, as long as you ensure the scale is 1.0 when you import it in). At that point, you have the camera and a great point cloud from which to build up a proxy model of the scene, safe in the knowledge that the point cloud was generated using the same camera you’ll be projecting from.

Once I tidy up the code, I’ll release it on here – at the moment it has no UI and it just spits files out to your desktop (Y-Up, no less) but I’ll try and clean it up ASAP and get it on here.

In the mean time, please take a quick look at the video below showing how it’s working so far:

NukeX Pointcloud in 3ds Max from Dan Grover on Vimeo.

Thanks,

Dan