07.06.10 – 3D Meshing Software
Scanning to Meshing.
One of the main workflows we’ve been investigating at Digital is to produce high quality solid models from 3D laser scan data. Currently there are a variety of different workflows and software packages available. The main constraint is down to the high prices that many of these pieces of software cost. There are lots of different options out there and for small business’s deciding which route to invest in can be a tricky business. As well as the purchase cost there is the cost of training staff in multiple packages. The 2 big guns in meshing software packages are:
Both offer a large range of functionality and come from a reverse engineering and industrial background. With 64bit versions of both available they can crunch large point clouds easily. However this comes at a cost, both are serious bits of software and as such come with a heft prices tag. From a surveying perspective they also come with lots of additional options which might not ever get used, making the justification for such a large investment hard. Polyworks has some great QA options built in which can be essential if you are modelling for safety critical applications, where a paper trail in necessary. Geomagic Studio can handle very large datasets easily and has a lower learning curve with its built in wizards.
Both are fantastic bits of software but don’t expect to get much change from £10,000.
Once you’ve created your meshes these need to be cleaned, fixed and decimated to usable levels and imported into your 3D rendering software. The most popular are Maya and 3DStudio Max.
This again requires more software investment and skills. As part of our ongoing research we’ve been trialling some alternative options to these packages, reducing the number of expensive seats required.
There are cheaper meshing solutions out there that maybe more appealing to survey companies. We’ve been looking at 3D Reshaper and VRMesh and for compositing Blender an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation.
The cheapest of these two VRmesh has some nice features but struggled with any sizeable point clouds making it not very appealing for large survey datasets. 3D Reshaper on the other hand handled large point clouds very well and had surprisingly fast meshing capabilities. Although the meshes created were not as detailed as those you would expect from Geomagic they were very usable and provided some good results. Mesh cleaning and hole filling options were a bit limited and seemed a bit unstable as trying to fill a hole with an open contour crashed the software. However 3D Reshaper has some other nice options such as feature line extraction of breaking lines for land surveying and architectural purposes.
Once the meshes had been created they were exported as .obj file to blender. Blender provides many features you would expect in high end 3D packages and a wealth of online tutorials to get started. It has a basic rendering engine which provided good images and built in animation options. Another piece of open source software worth mentioning is MeshLab. Meshlab is an open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. Its a great free piece of software for viewing and editing meshes. All in all this workflow offers an alternative to the large vendors and with many project budgets being slashed provides a viable cost effective option for 3D modelling.
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