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Import ASCII data
I’m trying to import a text file given to me by someone else, but it’s not working. The file is formatted in the way specified in the Cinema help file – comma delimited, with the column headings as they should be and a column for the point number, and for each X, Y and Z value. But it’s not importing. The file has 1,039,595 points, and I thought maybe there might be a limit to the size that could be imported, so I copied out the first 500 points and made a test file to try. I couldn’t import that either. Absolutely nothing happens; I don’t get any indication that Cinema is doing anything at all. Could there be something that’s left out of the process?
I’m using Cinema 11 on a Mac, OS 10.5.6.
thanks,
Jack
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5 Replies
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never tried to use it before but a quick look says you can import ascii animation data in the Timeline or ascii point info in the Structure Manager. A quick test and I see you have to put an empty Polygon object in to receive the points and then it just imports the ‘point cloud’ no polys are made you’d have to connect them by hand and with a million points… but maybe wiser heads know more.
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Thanks Brian. I tried this with a test file of 5000 points copied from the original text file and pasted into a new file, and it worked. But I couldn’t find any way to connect all the points automatically to make an object. I tried the file with over a million points, and after 15 minutes the Mac beachball was still spinning, and Cinema was “not responding,” according to the message I got when I decided to force quit. If I have to connect them all by hand anyway, it’s simply not going to happen, unless someone knows of a way to automatically skin the points to make polygons.
Thanks for your help and input.
Jack
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I don’t know of a way to automatically do that. In C4D it looks like you need a points ascii file and a poly ascii file to build an object in that way. That makes sense since the program would have to make guesses about which points to use to make any one poly.
What is the object anyway? Can you get it in a different format?
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The object is (or will be, if I can find a way to make it) a 3D representation of data from a gas chromatograph, which is used to analyze chemical samples, in this case oil-polluted water. The data can be plotted as 3D graphs, some of which they’ve shown me. But they want to be able to have a movie showing a fly-around of the data in order to see the sample data all around it. It would be like a terrain, with large and small spikes instead of mountains and valleys. The data was generated in Excel, and they gave me the data file from that, formatted as Cinema wants it. I don’t think they have a way of generating or exporting an actual 3D model to give me, so I’m trying to make one. I’m not sure what other format would be useful in Cinema anyway – I haven’t actually done this type of thing very much. I’ve made terrains from data using grayscale height maps that clients have given me, but I don’t know that they can create one from this data. That could be a way to go, though – instead of thinking of it as a data plot, think of it as a terrain. I think I’ll ask the client about that (probably a long shot). Other than that, I think we may be out of luck on this one.
Jack
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if the points are generated in a completely predictable fashion (likely) and they are a grid it should be possible to generate a poly ascii file. If you take a cube make it editable, generate a point ascii file and a poly ascii file you can see the point file just shows where they are in space and the poly file just shows which points are used to make a poly. So if you can figure out the regular pattern of of point numbering you should be able to generate your own poly file. Since it’s a million points+ that likely means being able to generate the file with some sort of program or script rather than doing by hand…
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