[vtkusers] Triangulating a Point Cloud

[Kevin H. Hobbs]

On Saturday 06 December 2008 14:12:33 David Doria wrote:
> I have a VTP file with points and associated colors. (
> http://www.rpi.edu/~doriad/points.jpg)
>
> I am trying to obtain a mesh of these points, ie. connect the points to
> form triangles.
>
> I have tried running the Delaunay 3D and the triangulate filter.
> Triangulate doesn't seem to do anything. Delaunay3D seems to make an
> extremely coarse mesh (http://www.rpi.edu/~doriad/triangulate.jpg)

You should try cutting through the mesh. You should see all of the nice small 
tetrahedra close to where your original points were.

Delaunay 3D produces the convex hull which I think of as shrink-wrapping the 
points without turning on the vacuum.

>
> Is there a better way to get an approximate mesh of these points?

You could set the alpha distance on the Delaunay 3D filter which prevents it 
from making the big tetrahedra for the convex hull.

You could take a look at the implicit modeler, Shepherd method, and Gaussian 
splatter. All of these make an image whose intensity is higher near the 
points, and can be contoured or thresholded.
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