MakerBot/Cleaning up cloud point mesh in mesh lab for 3D printing

Purpose

Cleaning up a cloud point mesh of an object in meshlab so that it can be printed using a 3D printer.

1. Open the obj file in mash lab which was taken from the kinect. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMesh1.png

2. Zoom in and select points you want to keep by deleting unwanted points. Make a selection around the points you want to keep and then go to filter > render and click on invert selection then press ctrl and delete. This will delete unwanted points from the mesh.

3.Get normals using Render > show vertex Normals ( this will create normals which pointing backwards) they need to be recomputed so that the normals are facing forward.

4. Recompute normals using filter > pointset> compute Normals for point sets, change number to 16 for the number of neighbors and also check the box for FlipNormals. Change the camera to -1000 so that the sampling program knows that the cloud point data was taken from a large distance, this would give it a better idea where the normals should go.

5. Turn on layers, top menu bar.

6. Now create a subset of the point cloud, got filters>sampling> poisson-disk sampling, change the number of sampes to 5000 and check the box for base mesh sub-sampling. This will create an even sampling distribution of the cloud points, and will give a general surface to work with.

7. Now go to filters > point set > surface reconstruction: Poisson, set parameters, 12 for octree depth and 7 for solver divide, these numbers can be changed depending on the scale of the original cloud point mesh. Make the numbers bigger if the cloud point is big.

8. Turn on light, this can found at the top within the tool bar and also turn on smoothing which is next to the light button.

9. Now approximate some of the cloud points to add more detail. Do add more points go to filter > re- meshing-simplification and reconstruction > use sub-division algorithm called LS3 loop. This algorithm will add more detail to the cloud point mesh.Sub-sample it three time, --> iterations = 3(this will sample it 3 times, can be done more times, just change the iteration to a high number.)

10. Step 9 should give the final version of the mesh which can be printed using a 3d printer.