3D scan

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 :)

Quick Lidar processing /  by Xuan Prada

Processing Lidar scans to be used in production is a very tedious task, specially when working on big environments, generating huge point clouds with millions of polygons. That’s so complicated to move in any 3D viewport.

To clean those point clouds the best tools usually are the ones that the 3D scans manufacturers ship with their products. But sometimes they are quite complex and not artist friendly.
And also most of the time we receive the Lidar from on-set workers and we don’t have access to those tools, so we have to use mainstream software to deal with this task.

If we are talking about very complex Lidar, we will have to spend a good time to clean it. But if we are dealing with simple Lidar of small environments, props or characters, we can clean them quite easily using MeshLab or Zbrush.

  • Import your Lidar in MeshLab. It can read the most common Lidar formats.
  • This Lidar has around 30 M polys. If we zoom in we can see how good it looks.
  • The best option to reduce the amount of geo is called Remeshing, Simplification and Reconstruction -> Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation.
  • We can play with Percentage reduction. If we use 0.5 the mesh will be reduced to 50% and so on.
  • After a few minutes (so fast) we will get the new geo reduced down to 3 M polys.
  • Then you can export it as .obj and open it in any other program, in this case Nuke.

Another alternative to MeshLab is Zbrush. But the problem with Zbrush is the memory limitation. Lidar are a very big point clouds and Zbrush doesn’t manage the memory very well.
But you can combine MeshLab and Zbrush to process your Lidar’s.

  • Try to import your Lidar en Zbrush. If you get an error try this.
  • Open Zbrush as Administrator, and then increase the amount of memory used by the software.
  • I’m importing now a Lidar processed in MeshLab with 3 M polys.
  • Go to Zplugin -> Decimation Master to reduce the number of polys. Just introduce a value in the percentage field. This will generate a new model based on that value against the original mesh.
  • Then click on Pre-Process Current. This will take a while according with how complex is the Lidar and your computer capabilities.
  • Once finished click on Decimate Current.
  • Once finished you will get a new mesh with 10% polys of the original mesh.

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.