3D scans with Texture

[spacepainter]

I have been using 123Catch a lot lately.
It gives superb 3D scanning results including textures. For free.
The problem is they output meshes that are not watertight.
To fix this, the polygons may be glued together in MM.
But MM does not show the textures.
It would be great if with an offset you could produce a wallthickness for the object and make it closed, so uploading to shapeways, with COLOUR information becomes possible.

[RMS]

Using the 'Extrude' tool with the direction parameter set to Normal will allow you to (approximately) turn a shell into a printable solid. There may be some local foldovers, which you can usually clean up by using the SmoothBrush.

(is this what you mean by wallthickness?)

There are some tutorials on youtube for closing off objects, etc: http://www.youtube.com/meshmixer

I am working on textures =)

[Patrick3D]

Textures You are going to make my life so much easier.

[AzDesertRat]

Textures would be such a huge addition I just can't iterate how much this would help my work flow.  In my case all I really need is the ability to map or overlay a single, fitted satellite image on a terrain mesh.  Baking vertex color data is my only option currently and while it does work some what, once I start to refine the terrain mesh the vertex colors become a blurry mess or change to pure white at times (ex: detail sculpting out a golf course bunker). 

Also, if you were able to add a simple measurement tool and height indicator as I posted in an older thread, that would be just incredible.  I've got a new project that I'll be starting next week which I'll be relying heavily on MeshMixer for refining the terrain mesh to produce a highly accurate representation of a 3 hole demo course.  If it goes well then the full 18 holes course will eventually be used to showcase a new golf simulator software engine that is based on DX11 with lots of very cool advanced features.

As always, thanks for continuing to update your software.  IMO Meshmixer is the best sculpting software currently available thanks to it's performance with huge poly meshes, sculpt tools and ever important dynamic tessellation capabilities.


Rat

[RMS]

Thanks! I will say that textures are more likely to happen before measuring tools. One issue with measurements is that right now, internally, meshmixer does not have any concept of units. In fact when you import your model it is scaled to a dimensionless unit box (and un-scaled on export).

One way you could incorporate some vertical measuring markers would be to import a set of planes at fixed heights as a separate object. I guess you would really need show/hide for those planes though...although I suppose you could translate them out of the way when not using them.

(Sorry I know these are lame half-baked solutions! All my focus is on adding texture support though...)

[RMS]

Wait, if you just want to project straight down (to use a satellite image), you can just use the x/y coordinates as UV coordinates (scaled to a unit box), no?

(what I mean is that this should be easy to do afterwards in other software....IE in Maya you could just generate UVs using planar projection)

[AzDesertRat]

My current concern is measuring height value of the terrain, notably in relation to neighboring areas.  I guess one option I could try is to create a large vertical measuring stick, say about 10M tall with physical notches every meter.  This stick could be repositioned to give a visual reference.  EX: Greenside bunker that needs to be 1.5M deep in relation to the green surface.  Guess I'll have to mess around with this tonight after work:). 

Down the road it would be cool if you could implement a height value reference for plane objects.  Default flat plane would be at zero value vertical axis.  The height value could be displayed next to Vert and Triangle info based on the poly detected by location of your screen pointer (outside of brush modes). In this way you could hover over any area on the terrain it would show the height value in relation to the default zero point (+or-) on the fly.

Yes, very simple to do after the terrain object has been exported out of MeshMixer and imported into Max/Blender.  Having the satellite image planar mapped to the terrain withing MeshMixer would provide a clear visual reference of surface area types (fairways, tees, greens, fringe, bunkers, etc.) allowing for far more precise selections.  Since the imported data originates from gridded Geo format I have found MeshMixer to be wonderful for creating clean breaklines using the lasso selection with slight auto-smooth applied (B key with slider adjustments).  Further more, I can then extrude or transform the selection(s) beautifully.  So it's really just the initial selection where the blurry baked vertex colors at zoomed in ground levels makes it very difficult to make a highly accurate selection.


Rat

[RMS]

ah ok, I understand...yes in that case having the texture does seem pretty critical =)