Surface from pointcloud?

[Macha]

Does anybody know of a way to create a clean, single-sided surface from a pointcloud? I am not talking about particlefluid surface or metaballs or anything like that. Just a thin, one-sided, clean, accurate surface from a complex multi-zillion point cloud.

Edited December 14, 2011 by Macha

[rurik]

Does anybody know of a way to create a clean, single-sided surface from a pointcloud? I am not talking about particlefluid surface or metaballs or anything like that. Just a thin, one-sided, clean, accurate surface from a complex multi-zillion point cloud.

Have you tried Isosurface? A bit messy but could be a good starting point...

[ben]

Meshlab is free and dedicated to this kind of task :

http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com/2009/09/meshing-point-clouds.html

But I would like to know a good Houdini solution

[bhaveshpandey]

somewhere on odforce there was a thread on wrapping meshlab functionality

within houdini using a unix SOP (??)

I've used meshlab for something pretty similar it gets good results but

no undo options last time I checked (are they there yet??)

Edit: meshlab via unix sop

Edited December 14, 2011 by bhaveshpandey

[3dbeing]

If you can create an SDF you might be able to use the volume surface sop... just found it!

[Macha]

The problem with sdf and all these volume methods is that you get an offset surface and if you have nonclosed geometry you get doublesided walls. It is also very hard to get good sdf from complex geo. Meshlab funcionality inside Houdini would be great!

[Macha]

Something like this! Any volunteers, ahem, ?

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?144504-A-Script-to-Skin-a-Point-Cloud-and-to-Make-a-3D-Mesh-out-of-Vertices

and explanation how it works:

http://hanspg.web.fc2.com/Pages/csv_scripts/algo_t15.html

Edited December 14, 2011 by Macha

[rdg]

http://paulbourke.net/papers/triangulate/

This one sounds interesting as well:

http://www.sagemath.org/doc/reference/sage/geometry/triangulation/point_configuration.html

[symek]

That are interesting links, thank you both!

Macha, if you need it badly & now, you could try a dirty hack of applying uvs to points, triangulate in uv space (Triangulate2D) and back to Cartesian, basically asking Delaunay to work in some parametric 2D space of a point cloud. Unless you can't have nice 2d space... (afaik slightly stretched is fine).

[3dbeing]

If you've got access Cortex may be an option

http://code.google.com/p/cortex-vfx/wiki/ParticleSurfacingExample

[symek]

If you've got access Cortex may be an option

http://code.google.c...urfacingExample

This is the same method as in particle surfacer in Houdini.