[vtkusers] How to generate a mesh from surface points (original surface not convex)

[David Doria]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Gao, Yi <gaoyi.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Bill,
>
> My impression on the Gauss Splat, at
> http://www.itk.org/Wiki/Create_a_surface_from_Unorganized_Points_(Gaussian_Splat)
> seems to be able to achieve this point-->surface reconstruction.
>
> However from your message seems that I misunderstood the its usage, or
> David's problem. Could I know the difference?
>
> Thanks!
> yi

Yi,

You are right, I forgot about that. From my understanding, that
procedure makes a volumetric grid of data and "fills" it with
volumetric blobs around each point. Then it finds the surface of those
blobs using the ContourFilter. I guess I didn't test this extensively,
but it seems to produce very "blobby" surfaces. I suppose there are
some parameters that can be tuned, but this is a fundamentally
different process than the point normal estimation->surface
reconstruction that CGAL has. What did you use it for, Yi? I was
trying to make a model from several registered LiDAR scans, but the
outliers were causing ridiculous surfaces to be made. I suppose that
might be the same result for the CGAL reconstruction, but they have
nice outlier rejection, simplification, and smoothing things to deal
with that (http://www.cgal.org/Manual/last/doc_html/cgal_manual/Point_set_processing_3/Chapter_main.html).
I've just started working on implementing some of this stuff for VTK,
are you interested in helping?

Thanks,

David