Creating and Exporting Textured Meshes
Overview
FARO® SCENE 2019 includes the ability to create and export textured meshes for use in FARO Zone 3D or third-party applications.
Details
Creating a mesh requires creating a scan point selection.
- Create a clipping box around the desired scan area.
- Right-click the clipping box.
- Click Create Mesh in the Active Clipping Boxes context menu.
Create Mesh Settings
Refine the quality and look of your mesh using the Create Mesh settings.
- Mesh Name - Name your mesh.
- Gap Filling
- Watertight - A watertight mesh has no holes and can be 3D printed.
- Non-Watertight - This slider allows you to control to which point densities triangles will be created in the mesh.
- Smoothing - Smoothing reduces measurement noise but comes at the cost of geometric detail and accuracy.
- Color Generation - A mesh can be generated containing color information at each vertex or in a separate texture image.
- Generate Texture - Creating a texture is recommended if using the mesh in a 3rd party application. Lower numbers of triangles are allowed for textured messages than vertex-colored meshes. Too many triangles in a texture may result in a loss of color information.
- Generate Vertex Colors - Vertex colors allows for the use of a greater number of triangles and greater color detail accuracy.
- Maximum number of triangles - More triangles result in greater mesh detail and larger files.
- Mesh optimization - For optimal geometric precision optimize geometry only. For optimal color detail but reduced geometric precision, optimize vertex colors.
Exporting the Mesh
Once created, the mesh will appear in the Structure Tree on the left side of the screen.
- Right-click the mesh in the Structure Tree.
- Click Export.
- Choose the file type and destination.
- Click OK.
Using a Project Point Cloud
When creating a Project Point Cloud in order to generate a mesh, some settings should be modified.
- Apply Color Balancing - This option is crucial to minimize noise in the mesh’s texture.
- Closed Surfaces - This option should not be enabled because it will create artificial points between scan points at places that will be occupied by faces of the mesh anyway, producing the same effect of a closed surface.
- Homogenize Point Density - This option should not be enabled. A similar filter is already run as part of the meshing process, so this would waste computing power.
- Eliminate Duplicate Points - This option can be useful to remove some artifacts that would also be undesirable in the generated mesh.
Meshing and Mesh Manipulators
This 2-minute video showcases SCENE 2019's new mesh features. SCENE 2019 adds Textured Meshing to Vertex Meshing as features, and now includes a grip system to move either kind of mesh independent of the point cloud.
Cannot view the video? Click here to download this video.