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It’s always nice to see a new PLY model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLY_(file_format)

Nice, thanks!

Any idea why the vertex colors don’t show up?

Didn’t know that they should be a different color. If you click "Play 3D" and then click the round ball twice it will show you each vertex, but only in black.

Just curious, do you want them to show up with surfaces? Why? What will you use this model for?

Hi,

I am just playing around with 3DVia, right now. The mesh is an output from Skanect, the Kinect 3D scanning software we’re making.

Right now we output colored vertices, but texturing is on the way.

Thanks – that makes sense. In an odd coincidence, I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s book Reamde and he just referred to each point/vertex have a string of three numbers to define its 3d position and a color. I haven’t thought about vertexes having color since the days of wireframe CAD. How is the color specified in the code?

Vertex colors are stored in the .ply file.

Colored vertices are gaining traction, now that millions of points can be handled by modern workstations and that colored 3D scanned point clouds are becoming commonplace.

See also: http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Polypainting

Can each vertex be a different color? It seems that that would create a much larger file since each vertex would have its 3D coordinates and some kind of color marker.

It’s early Monday morning and I’m missing the connection between polypainting and vertex colors. Could you enlighten me a little more? (My background is in CAD, not DCC.) Thanks!

Yes, all vertices can have distinct colors. This increases the size of files, indeed.

As for the connection between polypainting and vertex colors, from the link I posted previously, you can read:

To understand how polypainting works, first consider a 2048 by 2048 texture map, which provides reasonable resolution. It has a total of a little over 4 million pixels.
The new version of ZBrush is fast enough to handle models with large polygon counts. If you work with a 4 million polygon model, then in terms of surface painting, simply assigning each polygon a uniform color gives the same amount of information as the 4 million pixel texture map. (Actually, somewhat more, since significant parts of texture maps are typically left blank.)
So, with polypainting, you can put all of the painting details directly onto the model’s polygons, and then transfer that detail to a texture map when the painting is complete.

Cheers,
Nicolas

Hi Nicolas,

So, by using polypainting you can get faster workflow, delay decisions about resolution, UVs and texture mapping AND have better looking models with a smaller file size? Sounds good!

Don

(Here’s the link again – http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Polypainting – for those of you who missed it up above.)