Complicated ReCap - ReMake - Inventor group of questions

[Anonymous]

I have a FARO Focus 3d scanner and use it in my line of work to scan my customer's equipment to collect data so I can use it to engineer products for them (I'm a mechanical engineer). I spent a number of hours today cleaning up a set of scans I brought into Recap. When I use the mesh generation service, the file(s) I open in either Remake or Inventor have a lot more garbage left in them- actually most of what I spent a lot of time cutting away. the file isn't terribly large, composed of 12 scans. The RCS file is 18mb, the mesh is 52mb, and the RCM file is 31mb. I am running Windows 10 (64 bit) on an 8 core Intel Xeon e5-1620 v4 @3.50 GHz with 40gb ram and a twin 1TB RAID 1 hard drive setup.

1. Why is there a bunch of deleted data remaining in the newly generated mesh even though my project has been optimized? I also unified it into an RCS file for kicks but the only thing I know I can do with it is insert it into an Inventor assembly as a point cloud. The problem with this is I need to have it represented in a drawing file, which is why I'm going the mesh route.

2. After finishing all of the above editing, ReCap now acts horrendously slow. Zooming and panning are almost impossible. All I really want to do still is to change the limit box but Recap can't seem to handle this. Earlier, Recap acted quite normal and fine.

3. When bringing the mesh into Inventor, the scale is grossly off. Where an object should be 20-24 inches or so, it's more like 1/2".

4. I'm not convinced that I actually need ReMake to do my work (currently using a trial version), but I'm unsure and know that it is a primary program for editing meshes where ReCap doesn't and I think anything like that in Inventor would be very arduous.

Part of what I need, I think, is to have a discussion with someone at Autodesk who is well acquainted with all of these products and Navisworks. Who can help me?

Thanks,

Adam Wright

[amorap]

Hi from Spain Adam.

Im going try to help you.

I have also a Faro Focus scanner. I have noticed that scanning metallic objects or very reflective or brilliant objects the point cloud gets very noisy and dirty.

I suggest you some things:

1- In the scanner configuration, Parameters -> Resolution & Quality -> Set the right slider (Quality) at maximum.
This setting increases the scan duration a lot, but each point is adquired form the average sampling of 8 shots, and then the noise in the point cloud could be mitigated.

2- In Recap, import your FLS files. Check the intensity levels, usually "bad" points  or noise have a poor intensity value. Then open a new project and re-import your FLS files filtering points by intensity. This can reduce a lot the noise level.

3- Your hardware seems to be enough powerful. Now I'm working on a ryzen 1800x computer with 64Gb, a GTX1080, and 1TB SSD M2 storage unit, but my last equipment was an old dual Xeon with 32Gb. To improve Recap operation, I unify the point clouds (losing realview and scan locations). In addition, you can reduce the amount of points doing a subsampling. Recap is not capable to do this directly, its needed export the project to a PTS or E57 format and re-import it on a new project and then decimate during the import process. Be careful with this, because the precision gets reduced, but meshing process gets improved a lot.

Hope this helps.

regards.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your thoughts; they are insightful and may help with the scanner, but they really don't address the core issues that I'm having.

[Anonymous]

I big part of my confusion is there's a major discrepancy between what I think Recap is sending to the Cloud Mesh generating service and what I get out of it. See the two pictures below:

[Anonymous]

A slight improvement after being able to rotate the limit box. But there is still a major discrepancy between what Recap shows and what comes out of the mesh service. It's like Recap is ignoring most of the cleanup work I did to remove the noisy points an just chopping things off at the limit box. The really odd thing is that I can clearly see that SOME of the points I removed are gone, but not most.

[ryan.frenz · Accepted solution]

Your first three items are all known issues/limitations.

1. The Object Mesh service works on the raw (structured) scan data, not the 3D point cloud.  As a result, some 3D operations are not respected in the process.  The two relevant ones are delete operations and hidden regions (both will still appear in the mesh).  It does, however, respect clipping operations.  The recommended workaround is to choose 'clip inside' instead of 'delete' when you isolate the points you wish to remove from the mesh.
2. Try to keep your selections as big as possible.  Lots of very intricate (overlapping) delete operations will cause this.  It's not your machine.
3. Due to limitations of the mesh formats, there is no real unit concept in the resulting mesh.  The vertices should be scaled correctly in a relative sense.  One approach to fixing this is to load the mesh in ReMake and take some measurements to determine the scale factor.  Then apply that factor when attaching the mesh in Inventor.

More about Object Mesh:
http://help.autodesk.com/view/RECAP/2018/ENU/?guid=GUID-57EE9105-057A-41F9-B5E1-D6268E1E92AE

-Ryan

[anil_mistry]

Hi @Anonymous,

I am checking back to see if @ryan.frenz's  post helped you with your question. Please, select the Accept as Solution button if his post solves your issue or answers your question.

Let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

Thank you and have a great day!