# Working with Point Clouds (Scatters) in Houdini

{% embed url="<https://youtu.be/k85KO2zsU44?si=FmiZimfrIFrWOntd>" %}

#### What are **point clouds?**

In the Octane Standalone pipeline, point clouds act as scatter controllers - defining the position, rotation, and scale of instanced assets like trees, debris, lights, and more. Instead of baking geometry-heavy ORBX files, Andrey Lebrov's **LMI Point Cloud Baker** exports CSV files containing only transform data.

**Why this matters:**

* ORBX baking of scatter data duplicates geometry per instance → huge scene bloat.
* The LMI Point Cloud Baker:
  * Extracts transform data from Houdini point systems
  * Supports **split-by-ID exports** for multiple asset types (e.g., 5 tree species = 5 CSVs)
  * Delivers **live-linked scatter nodes** in Octane Standalone - update once, update everywhere<br>

**Use Cases:**

* Animated forests
* Procedural cities using nested assemblies
* Layout replication with point cloud-driven asset connections

**Bonus:**\
These CSV scatter files can be refreshed and updated in Standalone anytime, to update your scatter simply re-export from Houdini and click refresh on the scatter node in Standalone

### Assembly Resources

* [Render Network Manager](https://rendernetwork.com/resources/Downloads)
* [Octane Standalone](https://render.otoy.com/account/downloads.php?#core)
* [Andrey Lebrov on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@AndreyLebrov)
* [LMI Tools Houdini](https://yt.lebrov.com/NLBC56)
* [LMI Tools Blender](https://yt.lebrov.com/aYoUSc)
* [LMI Tools C4D](https://yt.lebrov.com/td0Hd0)