Complex Mesh

[ccwbarry]

Hi Daniel,

I've managed to open a point cloud from Cyclone in .pts format in CloudCompare. I'm trying to run a mesh on it but getting the error "Cloud must have normals!"

Anyway around this? I'm no expert in these things! Any help you can provide would be great.

Christian

[daniel]

There's 2 ways of computing normals:
- either use 'Edit > Normals > Compute' (one the cloud is selected)
- or you can try the qPCL plugin (Compute normals)

You'll se that depending on your cloud shape it's not always easy to get a clean result... good luck ;)

[ccwbarry]

Hi Daniel,

I've computed the normals via the qPCL plugin with a search radius of 0.0201 - the default settings. When I run the Poisson Reconstruction my results aren't great. When I increase the value to above 10 the program becomes unresponsive. Do you know of anyway around this? My point cloud is quite complex and has over 6m points - maybe this could be the issue?

Cheers,
Christian

[daniel]

Indeed, for very complex shapes you'll need to use higher levels (11, 12, etc.). And you'll need very clean normals (i.e. all oriented in the right way, smooth, etc.).

[ccwbarry]

Having fun playing with the program :)

Just another quick question, if there anyway to see the attributes of the mesh I've created? Number of faces, etc?

Cheers

[daniel]

Either select (click on) the mesh and then look at the 'properties' panel on the bottom-left. Otherwise, right click on the mesh entry in the database tree and then select the 'Information (recursive)' entry.