Create a PointSet

A pyvista.PointSet is a concrete class representing a set of points that specifies the interface for datasets that explicitly use “point” arrays to represent geometry. This class is useful for improving the performance of filters on point clouds.

This example shows the performance improvement when clipping using the pyvista.DataSetFilters.clip() filter on a pyvista.PointSet.

from __future__ import annotations

import time

import pyvista as pv
from pyvista import examples

lidar = examples.download_lidar()

tstart = time.time()
clipped = lidar.clip(origin=(0, 0, 1.76e3), normal=(0, 0, 1))
t_elapsed = time.time() - tstart
print(f"Time to clip with a PolyData {t_elapsed:.2f} seconds.")

Time to clip with a PolyData 2.69 seconds.

Plot the clipped polydata

clipped.plot(show_scalar_bar=False)

Static Scene

Interactive Scene

Show the performance improvement when using a PointSet. This is only available with VTK >= 9.1.0.

# pset = lidar.cast_to_pointset()

if pv.vtk_version_info >= (9, 1):
    lidar_pset = lidar.cast_to_pointset()
    tstart = time.time()
    clipped_pset = lidar_pset.clip(origin=(0, 0, 1.76e3), normal=(0, 0, 1))
    t_elapsed = time.time() - tstart
    print(f"Time to clip with a PointSet {t_elapsed:.2f} seconds.")

Time to clip with a PointSet 0.05 seconds.

Plot the same dataset.

Note

PyVista must still create an intermediate PolyData to be able to plot, so there is no performance improvement when using a pyvista.PointSet

if pv.vtk_version_info >= (9, 1):
    clipped_pset.plot(show_scalar_bar=False)

Static Scene

Interactive Scene