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Blender

The Blender Handbook for 3D Point Cloud Visualization and Rendering

Complete guide to create 3D experiences with large point clouds in Blender

Florent Poux, Ph.D.
Towards Data Science
20 min readFeb 28, 2024

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In this tutorial, I want to fill a large internet gap: how to leverage one of the best 3D tools for manipulating and visualizing massive point cloud datasets.

3D Point Cloud Visualization in Blender, by Florent Poux
3D Point Cloud Visualization of an old factory within Blender. © F. Poux

This tool is called Blender. It allows us to address complex analytical scenarios by experimenting with different data visualization techniques. And this is precisely what brings us here together.

What is the best foundational workflow to tie down Reality Capture datasets (in the form of point clouds) with Blender's extended Data Visualization capabilities?

🦊Florent: Reality Capture is somewhat a “new” term that can be pretty confusing, knowing some software and companies got their name from it. You can see this “discipline” as a specialized branch of “3D Mapping”, where the goal is to capture 3D Geometries from the real world with various sensors such as LiDAR or Passive Cameras (through Photogrammetry and 3D Computer Vision). You can see how we do that in this article: Guide to 3D Reconstruction with Photogrammetry

In this guide, I break down the process into nine clear steps, as illustrated below.

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Florent Poux, Ph.D.
Florent Poux, Ph.D.

Written by Florent Poux, Ph.D.

🏆 Director of Science | 3D Data + Spatial AI. https://learngeodata.eu (💻 + 📦 + 📙 + ▶️)

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