Decimating a Mesh

[cwickersham]

Hi,

I'm attempting to 3D print a Revit model, and as of now I can print basic shapes of buildings.
As soon as the building gets complex, ie, adding stairs and ductwork, the mesh that Revit generates becomes full of holes, hanging particles and geometric intersections.

To combat this I can generate a dense point cloud around the mesh, and then run a high level surface reconstruction.

This process however generates a very large file due to all the triangles.

Is there a plug-in or a way within CloudCompare to decimate the triangles on a mesh?

Thanks, and if you have any better suggestions for what I'm trying to do, I'm certainly open!

Caleb Wickersham
Coast 2 Coast Surveys

[daniel]

Hi,

CloudCompare is not very strong when dealing with meshes. Especially if there's no 'cloud' involved ;)

You should look at Meshlab (https://sourceforge.net/projects/meshlab/) or Instant Meshes (https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes).

[cwickersham]

Thanks for the quick feedback!

I suppose the my next issue becomes taking a high level surface reconstruction with +5mil triangles into any other program. During the import process the program usually crashes or times out due to the +5GB of data in the mesh. If I could get it into the program, be it Autodesk Memento or Meshlab or some other program, I could decimate there, greatly reducing the file size while maintaining the resolution and integrity of the mesh.

[cwickersham]

Although, I may be thinking about the whole process wrong.

Maybe I should find a way to fix the mesh without having to run intensive calculations through CloudCompare.

I'll look at MeshLab for a while. My solution for fixing the .fbx might be within there.

[cdordoni]

http://www.cadspan.com/

It is designed for preparing architectural models for printing.

[cwickersham]

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm downloading a trial version now!

[cosmocompare]

Meshlab has quadratic edge decimation which is very cool and free and some other decimation and point cloud filters, my fave is 3dsmax 2016 planar simplification.

[PablerasBCN]

Use this, totally badass retopo soft:
https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes