claudius

Plugin for Maya and Arnold to display and render Point Clouds produced by 3D Laser Scanners.

Consists of:

• a Maya Plugin with a FileTranslator and a custom Maya Node
• an Arnold Procedural to render the Point Cloud with Arnold
• an MtoA Extension, to translate the custom Maya Node to the Arnold Procedural

Demo video: https://vimeo.com/356404909

How to build

Prebuild binaries are avaible from the Releases section Currently only Windows is supported.

Prerequisites

Non-optional dependencies:

• Maya Devkit
• Arnold SDK
• MtoA Installation (already comes with headers and libs)

Locations of Arnold SDK and MtoA Installation are provided using the Environment Variables MTOA_LOCATION and ARNOLD_HOME

Build

Standart Cmake out-of-source build

mkdir build
cd build
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat" x64
cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" ..
cmake --build . --config Release

How to run Maya with Claudius

The build procuces a Zip-Archive containing a Maya Module. The prebuild binaries are the same Zip-Archive. When you extract the Zip-File, you get the Maya Module. You have two options:

1. Add the folder containing the claudius.mod file to your %MAYA_MODULE_PATH% (for example in your Maya.env) and launch Maya regulary
2. Use the launch_maya_with_claudius.bat, which will take care of temporaly setting the %MAYA_MODULE_PATH% and launches Maya

Claudius in action

Viewport

When you loaded the Claudius Plugin, you can import a Point Cloud file using File -> Import. You can select the Claudius Node in the Outliner (Viewport selection does not work), you get additional options. You can change the file path, display the Point Cloud with color and render only a subset of the particles in the Viewport

Rendering with Arnold

Just select Arnold as the current renderer and hit render. The Render with Color option is translated to Arnold, the Render with every Nth option not.

Detailed documentation

here (German only)