This morning I went back to look at Project Memento, with a view to using it to trim down a model I captured using ReCap Photo. I started with the model of the Morgan 3 Wheeler shown in this previous post.
The first thing you’ll notice when launching Project Memento is the modern, chrome-free user interface making copious use of marking menus. Navigation is fairly simple using a 3-button mouse.
It was straightforward to select sections of the mesh and delete them:
I repeated this – along with various zoom/pan/rotate operations to make different sections of the model visible for editing – until the mesh was pretty much as I wanted it. (I didn’t try to heal the mesh to make it watertight – this particular capture wasn’t complete enough for that, I don’t think.)
Just having the texture maintained made the results visually much more interesting than those I was able to get using meshmixer.
From there it’s very simple to export a mesh that’s decimated appropriately:
The original 120 MB .OBJ export from ReCap Photo came down to 70 MB when cropped, and when exported varied between this amount and under 7 MB, depending on the decimation percentage chosen. The equivalent .RCM files seem to weigh in at around half the size of the .OBJ, even with the textures embedded (with .OBJ these are stored separately).
Now what I really need is for the .OBJ export to generate textures (and a linking .MTL file), which would allow me to visualise the textured mesh inside a PointCloud Browser session. :-)
Update:
Murali confirmed that texture export is on its way, which is great news. He also kindly reminded me that lasso select followed by reverse delete (or “delete unselected mesh”) is the most efficient way to crop unwanted sections of your mesh:
Update 2:
Ryan Schmidt, the author of meshmixer, has clarified that the tool can also be used to work with textured output from ReCap Photo: you just need to use “Import Textured” in the File menu (you may also need to switch to the Shaders panel by clicking the sphere in the tabbed panel at the top left and drag-and-drop the “Planet Earth” sphere onto the model).
Textures are imported by default as not all the tools support them, as yet (hole filling does, though, which is pretty cool). The limitations as they stand at the time of writing are listed here (although JPG textures are now supported, something I confirmed with the above model).
Thanks, Ryan!
