Am 28.10.2016 um 11:35 schrieb Stephen:

>> So this probably doesn't qualify as whatever Mike had in mind when
>> suggesting that "POV-Ray should support point clouds".
> 
> Are you sure we are talking about the same thing?

Pretty much so.

> It seems to me that df3's are point clouds.

Nope. DF3 is a voxel format, which is an entirely different beast.

You can think of a point cloud as just the bare vertices of a mesh, with
no triangles to connect them up. Each point is explicitly specified by
its set of coordinates, and the points are the primary data (although
additional attributes may be associated to them, such as colours). Point
clouds are often used to represent an object's volume by providing
sample points on that object's surface (though there are also measuring
processes that generate data points all across a given volume), and this
type of point cloud data is often the raw output format of
professional-grade 3D scanning devices.

Voxel data, on the other hand, is the 3D equivalent of a pixel image: An
implicit regular grid of "volume pixels" (hence the term) covering a
(typically box-shaped) region in 3D space, and explicit attributes
associated with each and every voxel, with the attribute values
constituting the primary data. That data may represent pretty much
anything: Colour, pressure, heat, wind speed and direction, or whatever.
Representing an object's shape is just one possible application, in
which case each voxel's data will represent what portion of each voxel
falls inside the object's volume. Voxel data is almost always derived
from other input data (such as point clouds).

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