Hi Tim-

At 04:09 PM 11/12/99 +0000, Tim Hutton wrote:

Just wondering if anybody had had a go at merging polygonal meshes using vtk.

When meshes are acquired from range scanners (or whatever) you often need
to take different views to see all the way round an object. These views
generate meshes that need to be aligned and stitched together to create a
clean mesh for the object.

I don't think there's a way of doing this in vtk at the moment, correct me
if I'm wrong.

There's no good way to do this in VTK. It would be a real bonus to have something like this.

It sounds like you're on the path of "zippering" the meshes together (ala Greg Turk's work). From the feedback I've got, and from what I've seen, this algorithm is extremely nasty to write and tends to be brittle.

If I were to try something like this I'd probably go with Curliss' & Levoy's algorithm (presented at Siggraph Brian Curless and Marc Levoy , A Volumetric Method for Building Complex Models from Range Images, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH96). It's volume based, fills holes, and is robust.

The thing is, I need to do this, would any of you be interested in the code
if I implemented it myself?

Very much so!
Will