Mesh to pointcloud to particle system

Beginners
,
1

Ok here is what I need.
step one: Control a human 3d avatar with the kinect (possible found plenty of tutorials)
step two: Render that mesh as a point cloud.
step three: manipulate those points as par or a particle system

I think should be looking at GLSL material applies on the 3D avatar, right? But I can’t find a way only color the vertex.

Any help of pointers would be hugely appreciated!

2

hi,

For the point cloud part : you can load your mesh using the pointFileIn and use image textures to manipulate them.

See the great tutorial from Markus here if you need more details : Point Clouds in TouchDesigner099 Part3 - Napoleon dissolved - YouTube

3

Hey Gallo,

I love that tutorial! and actually I have borrowed the technique for other projects. But to use Markus technique here I would have to manipulate the rigged avatar, then export all the vertices and save them into a texture, right? Any idea on how to go about that?

4

First thought here is to convert the mesh SOP to a CHOP and then the CHOP to a TOP. I do not know how dense your object is but with 40.000 points its still running in under 1 ms for the transformation. So thats def a nice one.

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5

Thanks!
But I don’t think this will be part of the solution I am looking for.
When rigging an avatar to a Kinect skeleton the transformation happens in the material - via the deform page. So the technique you suggest would give me a static point cloud of the mesh, and not one that deforms with skeleton data. For example if you open the Humanoid FBX in the sample folder. You will see a character properly rigged and animated, yet the deformation happens in the material not the mesh, you can see how the mesh stays static and there for the point cloud as well :confused:

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6

When rigging an avatar to a Kinect skeleton the transformation happens in the material - via the deform page. So the technique you suggest would give me a static point cloud of the mesh, and not one that deforms with skeleton data

You can use the Deform SOP to deform the vertices in SOP-space. The parameters would be the same as those on the material’s deform page. Here’s another thread on the same topic: