Meshlab

Meshlab polygon reduction /  by Xuan Prada

Meshlab is probably the only available solution (proprietary Lidar software doesn't count) when you have to deal with very heavy poly count. I'm working with some complex terrains, some of them up to 50 million polys and Maya or Zbrush just can't handle that. I'm reducing the poly count considerably fast in Meshlab with its polygon reduction tools.

  • This terrain has more than 16 million polys. Maya can't handle this very well, and Zbrush can't manage memory to even open it. Just import it in Meshlab.
  • You will be using the Quadric Edge Collopse Decimation tool a lot.
  • There are different strategies available, I like to use the percentage one. In this case by 0.5
  • I'll be getting an 8 million poly terrain.
  • I just run the tool one more time to get a 4 million terrain. I can work in Maya with this :)

Meshlab align to ground /  by Xuan Prada

If you deal a lot with 3D scans, Lidars, photogrammetry and other heavy models, you probably use Meshlab. This "little" software is great managing 75 million polygon Lidars and other complex meshes. Photoscan experienced users usually play with the align to ground tool to establish the correct axis for their resulting meshes.

If you look for this option in Meshlab you wouldn't find it, at least I didn't. Please let me know if you know how to do this.
What I found is a clever workaround to do the same same thing with a couple of clicks.

  • Import your Lidar or photogrammetry, and also import a ground plane exported from Maya. This is going to be your floor, ground or base axis.
  • This is a very simple example. The goal is to align the sneaker to the ground. I would like to deal with such a simple lidars at work :)
  • Click on the align icon.
  • In the align tool window, select the ground object and click on glue here mesh.
  • Notice the star that appears before the name of the object indicating that the mesh has been selected as base.
  • Select the lidar, photogrammetry or whatever geometry that need to be aligned and click on point based glueing.
  • In this little windows you can see both objects. Feel free to navigate around it behaves like a normal viewport.
  • Select one point at the base of the lidar by double clicking on top of it. Then do the same in one point of the base geo.
  • Repeat the same process. You'll need at least 4 points.
  • Done :)

MeshLab /  by Xuan Prada

Just pointing up to a great tool that I’ve been using lately.
It’s a fast, stable and free .obj viewer for Mac, I’m using it a lot while scanning on set, just works great! give it a try.
All the information here http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

And a couple of screenshots.