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 :)