I have a point cloud scan of the USS Arizona wreck with 63 million points. I have successfully imported it into Rhino for Windows 6. I have never used Rhino but from research I think I can create a mesh that I can then print.
If anyone could provide step-by-step instructions - please assume that I have no idea what I am doing. If this is something that Rhino cannot do I would like to know that too.
Thank you!
This is not really possible with Rhino, it will most likely just die when you try to create a mesh from the point cloud using something like MeshPatch or MeshFromPoints… 63m points is just way too huge.
You might look at CloudCompare - free open source software for dealing with point cloud data - it does have some mesh creation functions, although I have no idea how it would do in this case.
I’ve also had success using MeshLab (free and open source) on point sets 50-100k in size using Poisson surface reconstruction, not sure how it would deal with 63 million either …
Meshlab or CloudCompare might be able to do this. Meshlab gives more options to generate the surface but seems to have difficulty with more than 20 to 30 million points.
Cloud Compare, on the other hand can handle enourmous point clouds, but only offers poisson surfacing, which in order to make closed mesh that you would need for printing, ballons out areas where data is missing or very sparse, although you can opt not to fill in these areas, but of course it won’t be a solid.
OpenFlipper, which I have not used yet offers poisson surfacing in their “staging” release. It has hole filling so it might be useful if a meshed cloud generated elsewhere needs some patching.