PointCloudGenerator

The camera track of the scene from which you intend to generate the dense point cloud.

An optional image to use as a mask. By default, the point cloud is limited to the non-black areas of the mask.

At first, the mask input appears as triangle on the right side of the node, but when you drag it, it turns into an arrow labeled mask. If you cannot see the mask input, ensure that the mask control is disabled or set to none.

Adjusts the display characteristics of points. These settings don’t affect the render output of the scene; these are for display purposes only in the 3D Viewer.

• off - hides the points.

• wireframe - displays only the outlines of the points.

• solid - displays all points with a solid color.

• solid+wireframe - displays points as solid color and includes their vertices.

• textured - displays only the surface texture.

• textured+wireframe - displays the wireframe plus the surface texture.

When enabled, you can make selections as normal in the Viewer. When disabled, points cannot be selected or changed.

Sets how the points will render. This control is independent from the display selection, but has the same settings.

When enabled, the object can cast shadows.

When enabled, and a material shader is added to the object, the object can receive shadows.

Sets the principal view where tracks are analyzed and the Mask input is applied. The secondary camera is calculated relative to this Principal View camera.

This control is only displayed if you have set up more than one view in your Project Settings (typically, if you’re working on a stereoscopic project).

Set the mask type to exclude areas of the sequence during generation:

• None - none of the footage is ignored.

• Source Alpha - use the alpha channel of the source clip to define which areas to ignore.

• Source Inverted Alpha - use the inverted alpha channel of the source clip to define which areas to ignore.

• Mask Luminance - use the luminance of the Mask input to define which areas to ignore.

• Mask Inverted Luminance - use the inverted luminance of the Mask input to define which areas to ignore.

• Mask Alpha - use the Mask input alpha channel to define which areas to ignore.

• Mask Inverted Alpha - use the inverted Mask input alpha channel to define which areas to ignore.

Set Keyframes

Click to automatically analyse the sequence and set the required keyframes to use when generating the point cloud.

NOTE:  Keyframes are selected to provide a large enough camera baseline to triangulate points, but you can add and delete keyframes manually, if necessary.

Displays the frames used to track points in the input sequence. Both automatic and manual keyframes are shown.

Click to set a keyframe at the current frame.

Click to delete the keyframe at the current frame.

Sets the interval between keyframes when you click Add All. For example, the default value creates a keyframe every 15th frame.

Click to set keyframes throughout the sequence at intervals specified by the FrameSpacing control. For example, for a sequence with 30 frames, the default spacing value creates 3 keyframes.

Click to delete all keyframes in the sequence.

Displays the depth accuracy calculated at the current frame when using the automatic SetKeyframes method.

The accuracy rating can help you to select frame ranges when generating a point cloud - higher accuracy frames produce cleaner point clouds.

Dense Tracking

Sets the separation value, in pixels, for points in the dense point cloud. Reduce the separation to create denser point clouds and vice-versa.

Sets the correlation threshold at which point tracks are terminated. Use a higher threshold to increase the accuracy in matching points between keyframes.

Click to display a frame range dialog to determine which frames are used to calculate the point cloud. Use the standard Nuke notation, for example, 1-19, 40-60, 65-100.

Points can also be added to the point cloud in stages using different frame range selections. Use CalculatedAccuracy to determine the most accurate frames for generation.

Click to clear all tracked points.

Post Filtering

When enabled, points that fall outside the Angle and DensityThresholds are highlighted in the 3D Viewer.

When disabled, all rejected points are removed from the Viewer.

Sets the threshold for the minimum angle to triangulate 3D points (in degrees). Points with a large triangulation angle are more accurate. Set a threshold of 0 to triangulate all points. Increase the threshold to retain the more accurate points.

As a rule of thumb, anything below 5 degrees is likely to be incorrect.

Sets the threshold for the minimum density for points. Set a threshold of 0 to output all points and increase the threshold to highlight isolated points.

Click to permanently delete points that are rejected by the Angle and DensityThresholds.

TIP:  To clean up the point cloud, try enabling Output points per frame and Display rejected points. You can then tune the Filtering thresholds and delete points at different frames.

Output

Sets the size, in pixels, of points displayed in the 3D Viewer.

When enabled, only the points generated at the current frame are displayed in the Viewer.

When disabled, points from all tracked frames are displayed.

When enabled, group colors are displayed as an overlay in the 3D Viewer.

When enabled, only points designated as part of a group on the Groups tab are displayed in the 3D Viewer.

You can label the point cloud using Groups to help visualize different parts of the scene.

Click to add the current vertex selections to a new group. You can also use the Viewer right-click menu to create, delete, and modify groups.

Click to delete all selected groups and deselect the group in the point cloud.

To delete points use Vertex selection mode in the 3D Viewer and press the delete key.

Groups

Lists all groups in the point cloud and allows you to set the name, color, and visibility of each group.

To create groups, enable Vertexselection mode in the 3D Viewer. You can then select points and use the right-click menu to create a new group or add the selected points to an existing group.

Click to bake the selected groups to a separate, baked point cloud.

Click to convert the selected groups to a mesh using Poisson Surface Reconstruction.

Mesh creation is based on the SGP 2006 paper, Poisson Surface Reconstruction by Michael Kazhdan, Matthew Bolitho, and Hugues Hoppe. The original source code and paper can be found at http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~misha/Code/PoissonRecon/.

Specifies the minimum number of sample points used to calculate mesh points, using floating point values.

For noise-free point clouds, lower values in the range 1.0 - 5.0 can be used. For more noisy samples, higher values in the range 15.0 - 20.0 may provide a smoother mesh.

These functions run prior to starting rendering in execute(). If they throw an exception, the render aborts.

These functions run prior to starting rendering of each individual frame. If they throw an exception, the render aborts.

These functions run after each frame is finished rendering. They are not called if the render aborts. If they throw an exception, the render aborts.

These functions run after rendering of all frames is finished. If they throw an error, the render aborts.