Surface rendering from sparse point cloud via plane intersection
Jul 21, 2025 - ⧖ 1 minI made a new(? might be old but buried) algorithm(? idk what this thing is tbh) for rendering point clouds as surfaces. It is mean to be used in augmentation with my SDF to point cloud convsesion algorithm. It works by representing each point as a plane that intersects that point and has the same normal as it. As you can see in the image in the repo's README, it implicitly results in a polygonal shape. My idea for a future iteration of this algorithm is to intersect the plane of each point with the planes of the $n$ closest neighbours which would result in a 3d polygon whose z axis can be ignored during triangulation, which I believe is the job for things like compute shaders or maybe even geometry shaders. I am not very good with GPGPU, and especially not things with complicated data structures like the Kd-trees or R*-trees this approach would require, so I will delay implementation until I do more research on nearest-neighbour queries on the GPU.