Which meshing software do you prefer?

3DReshaper, FROST, MeshLab, VRMesh, ZBrush & 3DCoat, CloudCompare, Etc
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gilles_3DR
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by gilles_3DR »

@IngSayyad, I think this is the right question!
At 3DReshaper, we try to avoid such situations where the mesh has a large number of triangles.
The main reasons are: 1/ these meshes are very difficult to share (too big) and 2/ most of the SW will not handle these large meshes...
dhirota
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by dhirota »

@IngSayyad

The short answer to your question for the project illustrated, it was a topographic study for the play ground, but we decided to do color scans for the entire school campus to help the school with other visualization applications as a pro bono donation.

The meshing is part of a longer answer starting with a posting in 2013 on the LSF about using Z+F 5010C for HDR imaging because of early morning low lighting conditions.

https://www.laserscanningforum.com/foru ... =51&t=4937
https://www.laserscanningforum.com/foru ... 7&start=10

We were scanning a 300 diameter historic banyan tree in the middle of Waikiki for a new US$400 million shopping center which used the banyan tree as center piece. They required a meshed tree for modelling and other visualization uses. We have Geomagic software and used it at that time with significant decimation of the scans.

Since we have been working with Thinkbox/Sequoia and saw this thread on trees, (most of our scanning work involves trees as objects), I decided to try out some work flows to include trees without spending any time removing vegetation. An obvious option is to focus on the scans to the area of interest for smaller meshes
as @gilles_3Dreshaper indicated. One of the reasons to looking at Sequoia is their ability to load in entire scanning projects with billions of points and automatically process them using DEADLINE on our servers.

We do not have specific client requirements for large meshes, since the majority of our work is for high end niche markets and seldom do we respond to commodity competitive bidding. The meshing work from point clouds is also determination of work flows to generate 3D printed and extracted models.

@gilles_3Dreshaper

Your two points illustrate where we want to be, so we have little or no competition in the work we can complete.
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by jedfrechette »

Here's a poisson mesh of some cottonwoods with great bark texture along a street we did recently.
cottonwood.jpg
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by gilles_3DR »

Thanks for clarifying the different approaches Dennis.
Not surprised different approaches answer different use cases! ;)
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by dhirota »

This is my final trial of this project, with the trees. I will testing Sequoia with the 300 foot diameter banyan tree that I posted earlier on LSF and above on this thread.

I tried a radius of 15mm which displayed 466.6 Million points and 929.5 Million faces. I am not sure why the number of points and faces in the file are less than the number displayed.
3-25-2016 2-28-29 PM.jpg
3-25-2016 2-39-52 PM.jpg
In the previous thread submittal, I culled out objects with less than 1000 triangles, to minimize the number of meshes due to vegetation. In this trial, I decided to leave all the faces in, and culled nothing out, which probably added to the number of points and faces.

This job used all 64GB of RAM and probably all 6GB of my video RAM. Nividia has a new Quadro M6000 card out with 24GB of video RAM.

@cpw006

Chris, how did your tree project turn out?
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by dhirota »

The previous post was supposed to be my last on the trees, but Boris (Bobo) from Thinkbox sent me an email reminding me of some other scans that we had worked on that reduced the size of the meshes significantly, like 90% to 99%, which I forgot about.

There are several approaches to produce meshes using Sequoia, and I have a long way to go to figure them all out. As they develop the software, more of these manual approaches will be automated. The one which is currently automated is to simplify the mesh by reducing the number of faces. From our other project, Bobo showed how you could reduce the number of faces from 100% to 10% to 1% by reducing the face count in Sequoia.

Depending on your application, reduction of 100% to 10% face count or smaller percentage may be OK. So I decided to give it another mesh generation try using Sequoia using the same parameters, except reducing the face count by 90% to 10%.

You can be the judge.
929.5M_FACES_3-25-2016 2-28-29 PM.jpg
86.5M_FACES_3-26-2016 11-42-04 AM.jpg
466.5M_PTS_3-25-2016 2-39-52 PM.jpg
42.9M_PTS_3-26-2016 11-44-12 AM.jpg
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by martinbujnak »

Hi,
try using RealityCapture (http://www.capturingreality.com). It can import scans, register photos to scans, create meshes from photos, merge with scans, texture scene, etc... You should better try it yourself rather then reading this feature list :) RC demo can import scans too.
It can handle thousands scans, thousands photos and its incredibly fast.
You can also do some low level filtering or to simplify your mesh to have some reasonable poly-count for your output.

Also, it is not just about meshing like other software - it actually does a volumetric reasoning for what is a real geometry and what is a ghost. So it can automatically remove inconsistent objects - such as moving cars/people/... Also photos are involved in this reasoning - what in human language say e.g. "this is empty space" or "there is a car".

It supports just PTX for importing scans but E57 will released soon too.

Here are some toy-examples https://www.capturingreality.com/showcase, but scroll down and there is a video with 30K images and few hundred scans.
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by gilles_3DR »

Sometime, our users do things we did not expect and it is impressive:


youtu.be/
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by cpw006 »

dhirota wrote: @cpw006

Chris, how did your tree project turn out?
It turned out well, we're not able to post screenshots as it's for an upcoming movie. We tested Sequoia with nice results, but we used the mesh we created in 3dreshaper. Lots of great info in this thread, lots of good work.
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Re: Which meshing software do you prefer?

Post by cpw006 »

dhirota wrote: @cpw006

Chris, how did your tree project turn out?
It turned out well, we're not able to post screenshots as it's for an upcoming movie. We tested Sequoia with nice results, but we used the mesh we created in 3dreshaper. Lots of great info in this thread, lots of good work.
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