LIVENODING 1059 / SV Processing Animated Point Cloud Data

[enzyme69]

If you ever wanted to process a bunch of sequence of CSV data, you can already able to do that rather easily using SV nodes.

I will be using RADIOHEAD - House of Cards data, you can download from here: https://github.com/dataarts/radiohead

The data itself already has a nicely cleaned up data ready to use. This is an example point cloud that you can also observe using Processing app, but we will be using Blender.

[enzyme69]

The setup itself is a rather simple procedures:

• Load all the Text CSV data into Blender data blocks
• Read the CSV using SV nodes
• Use a simple Python to simply load the correct CSV, as frame got updated

I recommend you to export everything as Alembic first. 1.6 GB per frame become just over 2 GB of data for 1000 of CSVs.

[javismiles]

so Jimmy, I managed to make all the nodes following your youtube video, in 2.8, all of them working great, except when I arrive to the very last one, the node of type : Exec Node Mod,

I cannot find that one anywhere, how do I create it? thank you so so much

[javismiles]

I found it, it was in Numbers area, thank you I got it now, and it all works well now, I implemented exactly what you show in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lSllfH31Kc great tutorial

my next question now is, at the moment we are replacing each point with a little sphere, there must be a way to create a more continuous mesh from all the points, how can we transform each point cloud of each frame into a more continuous shape? into a smoother continuous mesh? there must be a way

thank you for any help :) and congratulations for your great work :)

[javismiles]

another question, in latest blender 2.8, after setting up all of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lSllfH31Kc if I render 1 single frame, it all goes well, it renders it perfectly, but if I use the "Render Animation" blender option, blender crashes and exits

why may this be happening? Im using a powerful Dell xps 15 9550 laptop with 16GB Ram and an Nvidia card with GPU etc

[javismiles]

so I decreased the csv files from 12000 to 400 points each and managed to render an animation, so maybe its a matter of memory. But there is another strange issue. If I drag the frames across the timeline I can see that in each frame a different point cloud is loaded, all good, works. But in the rendered frames in the rendered animation, some of the frames repeat the previous frame, it is as if when rendering the animation blender is not applying the right file on each frame. However when dragging through the timeline it works well, any tips? thank you :)

[javismiles]

it seems to be rendering two identical frames, and then the next two frames change, then again two identical ones, then two different ones, then two identical ones, weird, but when scrubbing through the timeline all the frames are different, all good, but when rendering the animation it renders two identical ones, then two different ones, then 2 identical ones, etc

[javismiles]

very weird, now I tried to export to movie, AVI Jpeg, 10 frames, at 10FPS, what I get is an AVI movie with 25 frames, which include the 10 frames that should be exported, they are there, but each is duplicated once or twice, so I get 25 frames that include the 10 correct frames and duplications of them, even though to begin with I didnt request 25 frames, I set 10FPS and a frame range of 1 to 10 also

[javismiles]

all right, found a trick, if to export the animation of the 10 frames, I set 20 frames to be exported, then it seems that the 10 frames are then exported correctly followed by 10 static frames after that, really weird but this trick worked although we shouldnt need to do that ;)

apart from that please tell me how I could transform the cloud of little spheres into a more continuous smooth mesh please, thank you :)

[javismiles]

so now I have it all working great in blender 2.8, all perfect, the one thing left for me is how to now transform all the dots (spheres now) into a more continuous mesh rather than a set of separated spheres, I wrote to the Sverchok team and they told me: "To make united mesh - Apply matrix node with flag 'join mesh' or apply matrix node + node mesh join."

and I tried to do that, however nothing happens, the spheres of the points still stay separated, so that's my challenge now, how to unify the spheres/points into a solid mesh, really important for me, any tips I would be super grateful :)

[enzyme69]

Hi @javismiles I only found out you posted question in here. So I am trying to do something similar at the moment. Blender 2.80 tends to crash when dealing with Sverchok or Animation Nodes. SO if you can use Blender 2.79 and somewhat transfer that to 2.80.... but I am actually working on similar thing: sequence of point cloud and trying to "mesh" it using SV nodes.

I'll come back to you...

[enzyme69]

@javismiles Yes you need to use Apply Matrix node to join those spheres but use the correct one, there are 2 Apply Matrix node...