Surface mesh from point cloud in Meshlab

1
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I have a point cloud of a terrain, and want to generate a surface mesh. Is this possible to do in Meshlab?

The point cloud is an xyz file that I generated from a raster file of a Digital Elevation Model. Each point in the point cloud is on an evenly spaced grid in the x and y axis, and at the desired elevation in the z-axis. There are around 1 million points.

I can open the xyz file in Meshlab and it looks correct, but I haven't figured out how to generate the surface mesh.

This question is similar or identical to Mesh from point clouds in Mehlab. However, the answer given to this question doesn't work for me.

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3dmeshpoint-cloudsmeshlab
This workflow seems to mostly accomplish this, although it doesn't appear to exactly preserve the resolution of the original point cloud. For this application, I really just want to connect the dots. Any more suggestions would be great: <br>Filters: Normals, curvatures, and orientation: Compute normals for point sets; <br>Filters: Point set: Marching cubes – Stu
Please provide an example. It sounds like your points just need a 2D triangulation (view from top), not a 3D surface reconstruction – MrMartin

2 Answers

0
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You could try using Remeshing->Surface Reconstruction: Ball Pivoting.

0
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to get good results with Screened Poisson or other methods. First, calculate the normals then use one of the following methods from filter -> Remeshing, simplification and Reconstruction-> 1-Screened Poisson 2-Ball pivoting 3-alpha complex 4-marching cube

if you used Screened Poisson the faces may be longer than the actual mesh so you can remove them by filter -> selection -> Select Faces with edges longer than... then select and apply the edge threshold

hope this answers your question

Best, MD