Awesome
holopointer
A quick and easy kinect-to-pointcloud converter for MacOS/Swift/Cocoa.
Holopointer also records .usdc sequences of the point clouds so that they can be imported into DCCs like Houdini or Nuke for further use.
Compiling
Prerequisites:
- XCode
- CMake (for USD build)
- Python
Before compiling the project in XCode, you'll first need to go to the project folder in Terminal and run the build_usd_monolithic.py script. This is so that I don't have to keep dragging an once-a-month-obsolete version of USD along with the project. If you're having trouble compiling it, I can make an archive of the app available, just drop me a message.
I don't have CMake!
You'll probably end up needing cmake at some point no matter what. If you don't like messing up your environment and like things neat and clean you can e.g. do a simple separate install of miniconda and cmake using this gist.
Why?
It's cool I guess.
Contents
Under holopointer/libusb-1.0 is a version of libusb that happens to work with the Kinects. This is included as a precompiled library for convenience. It's probably veeeeery old. Also, under holopointer/kinect is a slightly modified version of libfreenect's kinect component. There's a couple of new methods to make alloc/dealloc possible through Swift. Both of these are pulled almost as-is from the cocoaKinect project.
Importing into other apps
Here's a simple combination of ReadGeo and Scanline to display the usdc sequence in Nuke:
In the ReadGeo node, point to one of the .usdc files and change the frame number (e.g. .0001) to #### (e.g. out.####.usdc)
You should get a friendly-sized point cloud in the viewport which can be easily used for rendering or particle emitting or whatever.