I owe a big thank-you to AliceLabs, who kindly allowed me to use their StudioClouds software and plugins. I used the Studio Clouds plugin for 3d Studio Max to create the above render (click twice for a higher-res version). This was renderd from a LIDAR scan of a forest in upstate New York. I’ve been sitting on gigabytes of LIDAR and point cloud data like this for a couple of years, and haven’t had the tools to render them at print resolution until now.

Being able to render point cloud data right in 3d Studio Max and Maya has been amazing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can do with my neglected data now…