Point Clouds in Blender

Deborah Schmidt

Helmholtz Imaging | MDC Berlin

Sep 29, 2026

Slides available at https://ida-mdc.github.io/workshop-visualization/2026-workshop/point-cloud-blender/

Introduction

Separate tutorial - click this box!

Rendering in Blender

In this section, we will cover specific Blender features to help you create beautiful renderings from scientific datasets. Blender is a powerful tool for this purpose, but it has a steep learning curve, so we’ll break it down step-by-step.

Import the PLY

File > Import > Stanford PLY (wm.ply_import)
Import Colors: sRGB - carries per-vertex color in as a color attribute
Import Attributes on - any other named per-vertex property comes in too
Lands as an ordinary mesh: all vertices, zero faces

Ant point cloud: Antscan specimen 1031, Acromyrmex balzani, CC BY 4.0 · exported from point_clouds_tutorial.ipynb

From vertices to points

Object > Convert To > Point Cloud
Every point gets its own radius - point.radius per point, or one value for all
Whatever named attributes the PLY carried ride along unchanged

Color from the scan

Attribute node (Geometry, name ‘Col’) → Base Color. Whatever color the point carries, straight through.

Color from a property

Attribute node (Geometry, name ‘dist’) → Color Ramp → Base Color. A scalar - distance from the centroid here - through a colormap instead of a lookup.

Naming, one more time

Blender’s Point Cloud object reserves an attribute literally named radius for point size
A property you export under that name silently becomes point size, not color
This deck’s distance-from-centroid property is exported as dist for exactly that reason

Ant: Antscan specimen 1031, Acromyrmex balzani, CC BY 4.0 · Katzke et al. (2026), High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity, Nat Methods 23, 663–672