About

FastPoints is a point cloud rendering plugin for Unity designed for both non-technical users and programmers.

The renderer supports PLY, LAS, and LAZ files with a drag-and-drop interface and is specifically optimized for large point clouds.

Visualization of attributes other than color is not currently supported.

Contact: Elias Neuman-Donihue

Publication

FastPoints: A State-of-the-Art Point Cloud Renderer for Unity

Installation

MacOS

Install the Unity Hub
Install the latest version of the Unity Editor and create a new Unity project
Clone this repository into the Assets folder of your project
Create a new folder called Plug-Ins also under the Assets folder
Install the native plugin and move the generated fastpoints-native.bundle file to the Plug-Ins folder

Windows and Linux

Install the Unity Hub
Install the latest version of the Unity Editor and create a new Unity project
Clone this repository into the Assets folder of your project
Create a new folder called Plug-Ins also under the Assets folder
Install the native plugin and move the generated fastpoints-native.dll and laszip.dll files to the Plug-Ins folder

Usage

To load a point cloud, drag and drop any .ply, .las, or .laz file into the editor's Assets panel.

To add a loaded point cloud to your scene, right click in the Hierarchy panel and select "Create Empty"

In the inspector panel on the right side of the screen, select "Add Component," search for "Point Cloud Renderer," and select the result

Drag your loaded cloud from the Assets panel to the "Handle" field in the component that appears

In a moment, a low-detail version of your point cloud will appear in the Scene view. Once this happens, preprocessing operations will start and will need to be restarted if the Unity editor is quit before they finish. You can safely quit the program without losing preprocessing progress once the "Converter Status" field on the Point Cloud Renderer component reads "DONE"

After preprocessing finishes, the full point cloud will render in the Scene view instead of the low-detail version.

The Point Cloud Renderer component exposes a number of settings to customize

Basic Settings

Point size: visual size of each point
Point budget: how many points can be rendered at once. Higher budgets yield better visual results but worse performance

Advanced Settings

Conversion

Decimated cloud size: How many points should be subsampled for the inital decimated cloud. Higher point counts will yield better results, but will take longer to display initially
Source: Path to point cloud on disk. Leave empty to use path specified by handle object
Target: Path to write converted cloud to. Leave empty to use default location (/your/project/path/ConvertedClouds)
Method: Subsampling method for the Potree Converter. Valid options are poisson (default), poisson_average, and random.
Encoding: Encoding to use for the Potree Converter. Valid options are UNCOMPRESSED (default) and BROTLI
Chunk method: Chunking strategy for the Potree Converter. Valid options are LASZIP (default), LAS_CUSTOM, and SKIP

For more information on settings controlling the Potree Converter, please refer to their repo

Rendering

Camera to render to: What camera to use for rendering. Defaults to currently enabled camera, either scene view or game view
Max nodes to create / frame: Maximum number of nodes to create a frame. Higher values lead to faster loading but a greater load on the CPU
Max nodes to load / frame: Maximum number of nodes to load per frame. Higher values lead to faster loading but a greater load on the GPU
Smallest node size to render: Minimum node size that will be displayed. The ideal value for this may change depending on your resolution, so lower this if you are seeing less detail than expected.
Cache point budget: Maximum number of points stored in cache. Higher values will make loading faster but use more RAM.
Draw gizmos: Whether bounding boxes for nodes and frustums for cameras should be drawn in scene view
Use decimated cloud: Whether the smaller decimated cloud should be rendered instead of the full point cloud. Only possible if decimation was done during the current editor session

Implementation

This plugin uses an adapted version of the Potree converter to convert and seamlessly render clouds within the Unity environment. For more details please refer to my paper linked above.

Known Issues

The loading bar is currently not very descriptive - it will stay at 0% during point cloud conversion, which is the largest chunk of the preprocessing pipeline, then jump to 100%. Hoping to implement a more accurate version in the near future.

lucafluri/FastPoints