Support for formats other than Potree cloud.js?

pnext / three-loader

Point cloud loader for ThreeJS, based on the core parts of Potree

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Support for formats other than Potree cloud.js? #63

Open glostis opened 4 years ago

glostis commented 4 years ago

Hi,

Thanks a lot for this library!

I was wondering if you had any plans to support formats other than Potree's cloud.js/octree?

Support for the EPT format, among others was added to potree.js (see https://github.com/potree/potree/tree/develop/src/loader) and I would much prefer to use this format than the Potree octree format for which I need to use the old and inconvenient PotreeConverter tool.

To put it more broadly: what input formats does this library currently support, other than the cloud.js/octree generated with PotreeConverter?

fahadm commented 4 years ago

Right now we do primarily support potree octree format. But I'll take a look into if the ept format offers significant improvements over the potree octree format. We may yet add support for it in the future.

glostis commented 4 years ago

:pray: Thanks for looking into this!

From my point of view there are several advantages of EPT vs Potree octree:

PotreeConverter is not actively maintained and has several open issues/PRs for critical issues (e.g.: https://github.com/potree/PotreeConverter/pull/335), while the Entwine project looks more active, is documented, etc.
Entwine integrates nicely within the PDAL ecosystem, namely you can convert from EPT to another common LiDAR format easily (see example) whereas this cannot be done with the Potree octree format (i.e. once you convert your data to a Potree octree, you cannot easily convert back to another format)
The EPT format stores its nodes in LAZ format by default (this can also be done with PotreeConverter, but is not the default) and seems to generate fewer nodes than PotreeConverter in general. (I'm not 100% certain on this last point, so to be taken with caution)

fahadm commented 4 years ago

Sounds good to me, the only thing that I see is that the base EPT code is LGPL while we are MIT. However, I will be porting/refactoring code from the Potree repo so that should be MIT too.

I'll try adding support, but expect it to take a few weeks to months depending on if something higher priority comes in.

glostis commented 4 years ago

Thank you very much, that would be great!

I would have liked to be able to contribute to this enhancement, but unfortunately, I know nothing about Typescript/JS...