Scan to mesh Issues

[pcdawson]

I've been using the scan to mesh tool pretty consistently over the past two months. Initially, I had great results but recently I've been experiencing a host of issues. The other day, I noticed that any point cloud I process with the tool now costs me only a single credit and the resulting mesh is of poor quality. The file sizes in Autodesk drive are also considerably smaller. To illustrate, I processed two floors of the same building. One cost 7 credits and produced an rcm file that was 1.45 GB. The other cost 1 credit and produced an rcm file that was only 240mb. Both point clouds were very similar in terms of density and number of scans. The point clouds I am processing are structured and have not been subsampled or decimated. Any ideas about what might be happening here?

[barmanr]

Hi @pcdawson ,

My initial observation based on your description is that this is happening due to the bounding box of the 2 different scans. The point cloud that came out small most likely has a large bounding box possibly due to dangling points here and there at the far corners of the scans or far away that causes the bounding box to widen. In such cases, the mesh will come out of low quality as it is covering a much larger area. If this is the case as I am assuming, you will need to remove those far away points and reduce the bounding box of the scene. 

One other reason could be, at the moment there is a limitation to the service whereby very elongated scenes such as terrestrial scans will come out low quality once again due to a very wide bounding box. It is recommended to crop scans to areas of interest to achieve the highest quality for that given area.

Regarding the cloud credits, do you see only 1 CC for the highest quality in your Scan to Mesh dialog before you submit a job? CCs are deduced based on the number of points in the scene. 

I could be wrong in terms of your scenario now but perhaps a screenshot of the 2 different scans and also the scan to mesh dialogs showing the point count and CC could help confirm.

Also, one way to confirm the bounding box of mesh would be to open the 2 meshes in ReCap Photo and toggle "B" to see the box.

Thanking You.

Warmest Regards,

[pcdawson]

Thanks for the reply. I did what you suggested and used the limit box to isolate a smaller area of the point cloud. However, I still received the same estimate of 1 Credit and the result was still a poor quality mesh. The funny thing is that this is identical to another building we scanned recently. I had no problems constructing really nice meshes. I simply isolated a single floor, clicked on the meshing tool and received an estimate for the number of credits necessary to process - usually between 6 and 8.

The issue I am having seems to occur with other point clouds I am trying to mesh as well. This all started about a month ago. I will try to upload an image of the point cloud I have been struggling with later today. All in all, it seems like the meshing tool still has a lot of bugs. Between this issue and the texture issue I referred to in another thread, it has really slowed my workflow. 

Thanks again for your help!

[barmanr]

Hi @pcdawson,

Since the issue is happening suddenly for other point clouds as well and the dialog is always showing 1CC, it perhaps has something to do with the application side as the point counting and CC derivation is done locally before the point cloud is processed in the cloud. It's possible that somehow the point clouds are all being processed in low quality for some reason.

Btw, what's the point count of the scans you are trying?

Would it be possible to do a clean uninstall and install the latest version of ReCap if not already done so? I fear that something might have got corrupted in that scan to mesh dialog since it was working fine for you before. Also, you can upgrade to ReCap Pro 22.1 using the Autodesk Desktop App if not already done so. 

Warmest Regards,