Point File In - Play tab

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

I’m trying to learn how to animate point clouds in touch designer. I have an iPhone XR with an app that records into multiple .PLY files which I have transferred to my laptop all into a folder. They are numbered numerically and sequentially. I am trying to get this animation into Touchdesigner, but can’t manage more than a single frame at a time. On the new Point file in TOP, there is a tab inside labelled “Play” which presumably is for playing sequences of Point cloud files, but the method of doing so is not very straightforward. I tried the same thing with Radiohead House of Cards point cloud data in .CSV files, but still no luck.

I sought out the documentation for it here https://derivative.ca/UserGuide/Point_File_In_TOP to dig deeper, but the instructions here are not very clear either. For example, it says

Image Sequence Indexing imageindexing - ⊞ - Determines how a file sequence is ordered.

but doesn’t clarify between the 2 options “Zero based” and “Filename based” and what differentiates them, or what file naming prerequisites must exist in order for animation to occur.

I thought that perhaps the built in Touchdesigner components would provide me with the naming mechanism I need (Which I could then copy), and so I made myself an animated point cloud image sequence of .EXR files (The greater than 4 channel custom file type recommended here https://derivative.ca/community-post/2020-official-update), and I was able to successfully create a point cloud image sequence from an animated Alembic file, but I was not able to get the image sequence to play back.

Sorry for the long post, I’m just trying to be detailed at what I tried because I desperately want to get this to work! I’m really starting to wrap my head around it. I appreciate any help, breadcrumbs, tidbits, or information, that could lead me to the solution.

2

Hi @sargentpilcher,

I tried here with some csv files and it seems when specifying just the folder name it then start playing the files in sequence. I tested with tiny csv files - how large are yours?

Btw: you can click on the ⊞ to reveal more information about the entries in this parameter type. For the particular Image Sequence Indexing the detailed information is:

  • Zero Based zero - Index the sequence of files starting at 0, after sorting them alphanumerically.
  • Filename Based filename - Index the sequence of files using the numbers on the end of the filenames. I.e a file named flower400.obj will be frame index 400, regardless of if there are other files in the directory before it.

cheers
Markus

3

@snaut thank you so much!! I got it playing now that I aimed it at the folder and not an individual file! Awesome!!

Also, thank you for the tip about the wiki, I didn’t know that symbol meant I could drill in further. That extra information about the indexing is very useful to know!