How to visualize PointCloud2 lidar? about webviz

[janpaul123]

We currently do not support visualizing 3d point clouds in the webviz-core tool, but we're working on it. Stay tuned!

[calvinwyoung]

I have to visualize a terrain surface using a point cloud. I'm currently able to do this by rendering a large set of Points (downsampled of course). This works reasonably well but it's not awesome.

For this specific use case, does Worldview support rendering a mesh instead of a collection of points? It'd be cool if I could use something like the <Grid /> component to render a mesh of the terrain.

[jtbandes]

That sounds like it might be a separate issue from this one. What's the original format of your terrain data? The Marker message has a MESH_RESOURCE type, but it's unsuitable for browser-based visualization because it points to a file on your local disk. Conceivably, support could be added to webviz for a wireframe mesh if all the data were contained in a marker message, but I'm not aware if there's a standard ROS msg type that's used for that kind of data?

[calvinwyoung]

Got it, all of that that makes sense. Fwiw, are using the Marker message type -- just wanted to see if your team had a recommendation for how to convert it or pre-process it for web visualization.

[jtbandes]

Which type of marker are you using? Keep an eye on #137 — we're close to adding our 3D panel which supports Markers out of the box (except MESH_RESOURCE).

[calvinwyoung]

Ah cool, thanks for the heads up — will keep an eye on it. We're using POINTS internally at the moment.

[janpaul123]

Should be solved per our latest update (#141). 🎉 (Feel free to file a new bug when you have a specific issue with the new 3D panel.)

[calvinwyoung]

This is awesome, thanks guys!