Blender 3.1a+ New PLY Point Cloud Importer

MichaelProstka writes:

FINALLY! New functionality added to Blender 3.1 Alpha (and newer) makes Geometry Nodes WAY better than anything I could ever make (I've been working on a standalone instancing app since 2017). Most of my fun math graphics are point clouds from Mandelbulb3D, J-Wildfire, and photogrammetry scans gone horribly bad. Until now, importing said clouds has involved a lot of heavy lifting. We needed a custom PLY importer to get those fluffy colored point clouds into Blender - and now we do. I was able to tweak the stock importer to now import ALL ply models as point clouds.

Sometimes when you tilt at a windmill long enough, the windmill yields :)

Note: Until I get the script correctly packaged as an addon, it will be necessary to replace the stock import module with the new one. See the Install.pdf file for more detail (its really easy).