#Meshlab polygon reduction install#

It can greatly improve the quality of the shape of the final triangles on perfectly planar portions of the mesh. Paolo’s comment: ‘Add additional simplification constraints that try to preserve the current shape of the triangles. If disabled, the edges are collapsed onto one of the two vertices and the vertices of the final mesh are a subset of the original mesh. Paolo’s comment: ‘When collapsing an edge the chosen vertex position minimizes the current estimated error. Optimal position of simplified vertices: Yes.

The value is in the range : 0 accept any kind of face (no penalties), 0.5 penalize faces with quality Normals, Curvature and Orientation > Re-Orient all faces coherently (note that this will only work for manifold objects). To approximate accurately the original shape only with well shaped triangles you require a higher number of faces with respect to allowing more freedom in the final triangle shape. Paolo’s comment: ‘Quality threshold affects the simplification penalizing bad shaped faces. The documentation isn’t clear on what the consequence of using a higher value is – my impression is that it’s slightly slower than low values, so I happily used a value of 1 with great results. Enter a value between 0 and 1 here the higher the value the harder MeshLab tries to stick to your original model’s shape. Target number of faces – Self explanatory Here are the option settings we believe to be optimal: You can click on the ‘Help’ button to get extra information about the available options, but that didn’t answer all my questions so I checked with the creator of MeshLab, Peolo Cignoni. If your model is textured, there is also an option (with texture) that will do a good job at keeping your textures positioned properly.

#Meshlab polygon reduction install#

If you haven’t already done so, please download and install MeshLab and import your model.įrom the menu, select Filters > Remeshing, simplification and construction > Quadratic Edge Collapse Detection. Below that, you’ll see the model becoming rougher and rougher (click on the image to see the high-res version): Let’s get started! Down to 120,000 faces, the difference in quality is hardly noticeable. The picture below shows the results of a test I did with a small toy car model that had 480,000 faces.

MeshLab is available for Windows, OSX and Linux. Chances are that your 3D application already has this built-in, otherwise the open source tool MeshLab offers an excellent alternative. Fortunately there’s a solution known as polygon reduction (also known as mesh decimation). Some tools like ZBrush can quickly create a high polycount, so its easy to run into this limit. More polygons than that quickly become too much work for our servers and printers to handle. There’s a limit to the complexity of objects that you can upload to Shapeways: they can have no more than 1 million polygons. These instructions are excerpted from an article on. The 3D printing world also uses STL files and deal with this exact same issue. Import STL Files With Sculptor Option 2: Polygon Reduction with Meshlab