Kevin Wampler wrote:
> 
> It will almost certainly be simpler to avoid attempting to reconstruct a 
> mesh unless you want to use some third-party software or you have a lot 
> of time to work on it (which as I understand you don't).  Fortunately 
> there is some free software you can try. Although I've never used any 
> myself and haven't looked into the licensing requirements I suspect most 
> are only available for personal use.
> 
> This one is pretty recent, and should be able to handle large number of 
> points pretty efficiently:
> 
> http://students.cs.tamu.edu/jmanson/programs_wavelet_reconstruct.html
> 
> 
> This one is based on some relatively recent work from from MSR and 
> should also be able to manage large numbers of points:
> 
> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/hoppe/proj/mlstream/
> 
> 
> The software here is a bit older but might be useful (links at bottom of 
> page):
> 
> http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/scanning/
> 
> 


I uploaded a video of what I am talking about.
to some this should look familiar as I posted it in the animation group 
a while back.

www.stineconsulting.com/s/anim_large.mpg

This is the type of environment that I will be dealing with.  Tho the 
are will be much larger - more tunnels.

The data in this example is 9 scans located at the red spheres, total 
about 2 million points.  Each scan was individually converted into a 
POV-Ray mesh and all 9 meshes were rendered together.  You can see where 
  the meshes overlap

As you can see, near the scanner locations, the detail is very high 
(lots of points) and away from the locations the data is more sparse. - 
the nature of spherical data gathering.

Ideally I would be able  to simplify all 9 scans into one thinned point 
cloud that may have about 30K points in it - then mesh the point cloud.


I have routines that will 'simplify' large point clouds, but once they 
are combined, I don't have methods to make a mesh from the resulting 
point cloud.

Imagine if the animation that I posted were simplified into 1 point per 
foot, then made into one mesh and rendered.

Note:  my goal is not necessarily to get the stuff into POV-Ray - but 
into any mesh format that I can manipulate.



I appreciate the tips and info that you've already thrown out.  I'll be 
looking into them closer as time allows.



Tom

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