Importing meshes: workflow options.

[ozbigben]

Back again...
Reprocessing some old images and discovered importing meshes into PS.  As I'm exploring different workflows at the moment I was wondering if anyone would care to share some of the uses they have for importing meshes back into PS.  Some stuff I've tried so far:

• Exporting dense point cloud and generating a mesh in MeshLab, Poisson reconstruction with a "high" samples per node to create a smoother mesh, import back into PS to generate texture. Not convinced this was entirely practical and my thinking may have been flawed on this one
• Exporting mesh for editing/smoothing in MeshMixer. My 3D sculpting skills need work too  (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ben-kreunen/14123270998/)
• (not tried yet) Texturing laser scans.  Photograph object, create dense cloud in PS and export points, align laser scan to PS point cloud in MeshLab, import laser scan into PS and build texture.

While the last one sounds like a lot of extra work, it's not really. Texturing is one of the weak points of the laser scanners we've looked at and manually aligning/painting photographic textures in ZBrush is a lot harder than it looks (to do well)

[chadfx]

I've been fairly impressed with Meshmixer...it seems to give you a nice amount of control over smoothing and reducing resolution interactively, and it has some nice repair/solidifying functions. I've re-imported and re-textured in Photoscan with nice results. It doesn't seem to choke too heavily on dense geometry, either.

One drawback of Meshmixer is that you seem to lose your imported texture once you start refining the mesh, it just turns to a flat shade solid color in those areas. It's also somewhat buggy, although not as much as Meshlab. (at least in MacOS)

I wonder what it will turn out to become as a final product from Autodesk, though...pricing, etc.

[bigben]

The last update saw it assimilated into Autodesk's 3D apps, in particular as a print driver for Design. I'm keeping the old installers just in case it becomes time-limited in the lead up to an pricey version, but hopefully it will stay free. It's a great little program although it's performance starts to slide on bigger models. The stability on Windows has improved a lot.

[JMR]

here you are an Example of a model that results from laser scanning with a Perceptron V5 on a Romer Infinite arm, textured in Photoscan from 70 photographs taken with an Olympus E3.
The ground control is shared by the two techniques and that makes just straightforward the alignment of both datasets.
The cross was removed during scans and photos. It has been CAD modeled out from scans taken with a Faro Focus3D.
The scanning and photos took 2 days, and the mesh cleanning and edition to deliverables took 1 week.
Enjoy!
https://skfb.ly/zWFP

[ozbigben]

Very nice. The thorns & cross are CAD additions? 

I've been reprocessing some old image sets taken for texturing of laser scans and while I didn't capture enough overlap for creating a complete model (a sculpted head) I got 90% of an object with only a few small gaps behind the ears with a better mesh than our laser scanner. I'll fill in the gaps behind the ears from the laser scan. 

In our case I think it will be better capture the images first and start them processing while the scanning is done. I should have an idea of whether the mesh from PS would be good enough for the project before the scanning is finished, and if there are problem areas, just scan those to blend the meshes.  The processing for the NextEngine on larger objects is pretty slow.

This is a Terragen render of one of our projects (this one was done before we had a laser scanner, using 123D Catch, so we had plenty of images): https://www.flickr.com/photos/123508974@N08/14137654369/

[JMR]

Very nice. The thorns & cross are CAD additions?

The thorns have actually been scanned too. The results are good as the scanner was set to highest resolution posible (about 85 points per mm along the laser line). The photo model is very bad, in this case, for reasons you surely understand. Anyway the mesh reduction has messed the thorns and makes them look awfull in close-up, but its still nice from the distance.