Making Things See

Cleaning Up the Mesh

In this section, we’re going to improve our scanning sketch in a number of ways. We’re going to preprocess the depth points to fix the “depth shadows” problem we just observed. We will also make a number of additions to the model designed to make it 3D printable. As we discussed at the start of this chapter, for a 3D model to be printable, it needs to be watertight. In other words, it needs to be a continuous solid surface with all of its normals pointing toward the outside. We’ll make a number of additions to our sketch to ensure that the model we build from the Kinect depth points has these qualities. We’ll deal carefully with the edges of the depth data we receive. We’ll fill in all of the holes in the depth data with a ...