I’m starting to use 3D Scanners in my business workflow and working my learning curve for meshes. What I’m trying to do is trace subtle contours in the rendered scan.
The mesh is too hard to trace directly since its so dense.
I setup a custom light source which helps a lot, but I’d like to just have almost like a “depth” shading that’s consistent, not light/dark shadows, right. The light/dark shading is hard to pinpoint the “topmost” of the edge. Its not horrible, but is there a better way?
All I need a fast, accurate and simple workflow to trace the edges. I can’t reduce mesh else I’d lose detail.
Maybe you would lose detail using Rhino decimation.
Here’s a relatively inexpensive tool for decimation that does a great job preserving detail.
It allows you to specify a tolerance to protect small details.
Balancer nPro
Unfortunately the scan lines are very prominent in the mesh, so that could be an issue with decimation, meaning the scan line ridges could result in a lot of triangles. Lets say you set a tolerance of 2mm (hypothetical #) to preserve small detail … the scan lines may be more than 2 mm in elevation and xy distance. So potentially you might loose small detail if you were trying to eliminate the scan lines and need to set the tolerance to a larger #.
What scanner are you using and how did you mesh the point cloud?
I’m using the Shining Libre @ 1mm resolution and meshed it with the same. I mean, I can reduced the resolution some but I want to keep “clear” identification of the lines and contours. What I have is mostly ok, i dont really care about reverse engineering, but I need to be able to trace (as shown). Maybe what I have is the best. Maybe I can import texture pictures too.
My main ask is to see all edges to trace as easy and cleanly as possible.
