Kevin Wampler wrote:
> Tom Austin wrote:
>>
>> www.stineconsulting.com/s/anim_large.mpg
>>
> 
> Nice!  Looking at the video it seems that the only thing which you're 
> lacking are tools to manage the merged point clouds -- it sounds like 
> you can both mesh and simplify the individual scans perfectly well.  Is 
> this assessment correct?
> 

Yes, creating a mesh from a single scan is somewhat easy - there is a 
point of view from which to 'look' at the data and make triangles.



> If so, is not not sufficient to get a simplified point cloud for the 
> entire scene by just merging the simplified clouds for each scan?  You'd 
> get some redundant data on the overlap, but I wouldn't think that would 
> increase the point count too dramatically.
> 

I think I have some fairly good ideas on how to simplify a point cloud - 
I was just wondering if anyone had more meat to add to the feast.

So, handling point clouds isn't too big of a deal.


> With regards to generating a mesh, are you satisfied with the quality of 
> the meshes generated from the single scans?

Not really.  Areas close to the scanner are very dense with data, areas 
far away are rather sparse.  I would like to 'even' out the point 
distribution.  Say a point per foot type thing.  I'm not after 
'creating' data in the far away places - but I defiantly need to thin 
the data that is up close.

If I do anything more than remove rows and column from the spherical 
data set I start to lose my point of view and it becomes more difficult 
to generate meshes using the methods that I have.


   If so, then it would
> probably be much easier to clean up the seams when merging them than to 
> generate a mesh from scratch (unless, of course, one of the tools I 
> linked to solves everything for you).
> 


If making everything a mesh, then merging the meshes gives me a good 
result, I am not opposed to going that way.

I've always worked with the points, and then made something from the 
points.  But it seems that I can work with meshes and if I need to, make 
points from the mesh.



> I suppose my main question is that since it looks from the video like 
> you have a somewhat reasonable solution already, what about it isn't 
> satisfactory?


To use the video as an example, I would like to have a fairly ordered 
distribution of data.  If you look close to the red spheres, you will 
see very dense data - too dense to even be useful.  If I could merge all 
of the data into something like a 1 food cells, that would be great.

My end goal is to have something that is manageable on a normal PC (as 
opposed to a souped up one) - likely in a AutoCAD format.  The amount of 
data in the video does not lend itself to that.

IIRC, the video is about 1000 frames with an hour to generate each frame 
in POV-Ray.


I just don't have the experience to make meshes from what seems to be an 
unordered point cloud. - That's what I am really after.





Thanks for your interest and help - I really appreciate it.

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