Save Point Cloud (not mesh)

[dancergraham]

Hello,

It would be very nice to be able to save the point cloud (not the ply mesh) for visualisation in Cloud Compare / Blender / Excel / another viewer. Maybe a simple xyz file format would be best as that is very generic, human readable and should be accepted by almost all visualisation tools. The pointclouds are not large so a compressed file format like e57 is not needed.

I think some data is lost when exporting to a ply mesh so that does not solve the issue.

[dancergraham]

I think it would make sense to implement this as a write_txt() method on the PointCloud object for consistency with write_ply.

A minimal working example would be

import numpy as np
rgb_scale = 255
xyz = np.concatenate([pc.coords, 
                      rgb_scale * np.array([pc.channels["R"], 
                                            pc.channels["G"], 
                                            pc.channels["B"]
                                           ]
                                          ).T
                     ], axis=1)
np.savetxt("pts.xyz", xyz)

[dancergraham]

Results for the cubes example visualised in Cloud Compare:

[ImneCurline]

how to get the same rendering result as the paper?

[dancergraham]

If you open them in Cloud Compare, set the background color to white and increase the point size and experiment with the view settings then you should be able to get something similar