Exploring 3D Point Clouds for FMX

With Delphi 12.Community Edition released not too long ago, it was an opportunity to test run what’s possible with FMX on the 3D side.

And while Delphi FireMonkey has 3D support, it’s not really a core feature. For a test run, the simplest of all 3D entities, a point cloud can serve as a decent stress test.

Point Clouds are now ubiquitous with the advent of 3D capture devices, which go from LIDAR to RGB-D cameras and all kinds of AI augmented approaches. So there is a plethora of 3D point cloud datasets out there.

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FireMonkey’s TCube & Tessellation

a cubeIf any of you had a look at FireMonkey’s TCube object, you might have noticed rendering it is quite slow and quite complex.

If you were curious enough to look at the code, you might have noticed that TCube is actually a static mesh made up of 452 vertices, 1440 indices and 480 triangles, instead of the 8 vertices and 6 quads (12 triangles) one could have expected.

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