Hi,

I've got some laser scan data that I want to turn into a mesh, but it's not just simple terrain, it's houses with roof overhangs, church towers and other stuff, where the Triangulate2D node with "keep point positions" doesn't give me nice results around the roof corners, since it basically tries to project a plane on top of the point cloud and ends up connecting points on the roof overhang with ground points, creating a mess where there are points on the walls etc.
There is an algorithm called Poisson surface reconstruction, that seems to do a decent job of meshing 3D point clouds, but I can't find anything similar in Houdini.

How would you guys go about meshing a 3D point cloud (not a 2.5D one) inside Houdini?

Cheers,
Ivan

The Point Cloud Iso SOP constructs a mesh from a point cloud with normal vectors. More details are in this tutorial: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/surfacing-lidar/ [www.sidefx.com]

This is an area where we'd like to improve our tools. Feel free to leave some feedback here.

ez57 img [imgur.com]

For instance, I have a drone-scanned Lidar point cloud, with both terrains and trees.
Could I easily remove the vegetation and approximate the bare terrain?

The video above is more of a product-like scan.
Terrains are different subjects.

With H20, you can use the new Point Cloud Normal and Point Cloud Surface nodes.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/pointcloudnormal.html [www.sidefx.com]
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/pointcloudsurface.html [www.sidefx.com]