Making Things See

Looking at Our First Scan

Now that we’ve reviewed how the scanning code works, let’s take a look at the final product. Figure 5-11 showed what the depth points looked like at the moment I took my scan. You can see me facing to the left of the point cloud in front of a window with a curtain hanging down behind me. Let’s compare that with the mesh stored in our STL.

Launch MeshLab and select Import Mesh from the File menu. Navigate to the STL file you created with our scanning sketch and open it. When your mesh first comes into MeshLab, it will appear as a black silhouette. Click and drag to rotate your scan around to face you. You’ll find that it looks something like Figure 5-14. What’s going on here? Our mesh is a mess! If you zoom in and drag ...