Join parallel surfaces

[lucas.falkenhain]

Hi all,

do you have a tip for joining and smoothing out two seperate surfaces which run close to each other? I have a complex scan which consists of two parts and want to join the areas where both blend into each other. The transition zone is partially "floating" with gaps between the surfaces and partially crossing each other.

Due to the complex shape it is not possible to make the whole shape solid and then use the sculpt tool to smooth the surface.

Any ideas?

I would really appreciate your help since I am new to MM and could not find any tutorials that help with joining and smoothing parallel surfaces, yet.

Regards

LF

[Anonymous]

Ignoring manual stitching, with MM the fastest way is to use MakeSolid. After that step you may want to set the source mesh as a target and use the SCULPT/Attract brush on the solid result to reconstruct surface details.

Better is to do some surface reconstruction from scratch when you aligned the partial scans properly. This can be done in Meshlab. The free tool offers several approaches to do it. My favourite one is FILTERS>RemeshingSimplificationAndReconstruction>SurfaceReconstruction:ScreenedPoisson

Running that filter at defaults on the source meshes combined to one file might give a too smooth result. So you might need to increase the ReconstructionDepth value...

[lucas.falkenhain]

Thank you for your response! 🙂

The issue is that my model is rather complex with a lot of undercuts and open ends. Generating a solid from that or one of the pieces I am trying to merge together is not that easy and seems to confuse MM, especially with the parallel overlapping and partially crossing parts. There is still some work to do before I can approach that step. For the moment I am trying to merge the two meshes together, cut all the excess away and smooth the areas where they cross each other. Do you think that Meshlab could help in that case?

Regards

LF

[Anonymous]

Surface reconstruction algorithms ignore the faces of a mesh. They take just the scanned vertices to get a point cloud. From that point cloud a new mesh is built while trying to construct a meaningful single surface from the points. Yes, Meshlab or another software with surface reconstruction abilities (maybe your scanning software is able to do that) should be a huge help...