Making Things See

Prepping for Printing

Now that we’ve produced a good mesh, we need to process it to prepare it for printing. This processing includes two components. First we’ll perform some operations on our geometry itself. The goal of these operations will be to simplify our mesh. We’ll use MeshLab to discard as many polygons as possible without hurting the quality of our scan. Our scanning code was incredibly naive about the geometry that it created. It is quite likely that our models contain duplicate faces and vertices and other features that don’t affect its appearance. By eliminating these we can create dramatically smaller STL files and significantly speed up the processing that will be necessary to prepare our models for printing with various different ...