MeshLAB tutorial
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A. OPENING POINT CLOUDS
(Notepad++ Text editor)
(Cloud Compare Point cloud and mesh editor)
(MeshLab Point cloud and mesh editor)
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OPENING POINT CLOUDS IN NOTEPAD ++
Let us understand what is a point cloud. First of all, it is a collection of point
coordinates as you can see in the figure bellow. Here we see a point cloud
in PLY ascii format edited with Notepad++
(http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.1.2.html).
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Here we see a point cloud in PLY format with binary encoding edited with
Notepad++. Binary encoding enables small file sizes but their content can’t
be edited manually. In both cases the header of the file is readable. We see
how many vertexes, the order for which coordinates are presented, and, in
this case, there are no faces.
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The point cloud that correspond to this picture also presents normals for
each point (we may say that there is an implicit surface), color (in RGB
space), and a quality parameter (last column). Again, there are no vertexes.
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OPENING POINT CLOUDS IN CLOUD COMPARE
CloudCompare can be freely downloaded from http://www.danielgm.net/cc/.
This software doesn’t require installation. Just unzip it and launch cQQ.exe.
Besides PLY format it can also open other file formats. Explore it.
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OPENING POINT CLOUDS IN MESHLAB
MeshLab can be freely downloaded from http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/.
Point clouds can be open by double-clicking in a PLY file (if you associate
this file format to MeshLab. Here we see the point cloud corresponding to
the first and second PLY files shown above. Since there are no normals
associated with the points, there is no light effect.
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NAVIGATION IN MeshLAB
1. Left mouse button + drag: rotate around trackball center
2. Mouse wheel: move forward or backward
3. Center mouse button + drag: pan
4. Shift + mouse wheel: change camera field of view
5. Double click on specific point: places that point at the trackball center
6. Control + mouse wheel: moves near clipping plan
7. Control + Shift + mouse wheel: moves far clipping plan
8. Alt + Enter: enter full screen mode
9. Control + Shift + left mouse button + drag: changes light direction (this
only takes effect if there are normals)
VISUALIZATION OPTIONS IN MeshLAB
Appearance options can be found under the menu TOOLS.
Other appearance and info options can be found under the menu VIEW.
Also explore the menu RENDER to change lighting, shaders, render mode
and color.
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