Exporting objects as meshes

Mesh export toolbar

Any object can be exported as a triangle mesh (though some shapes may be better suited to point cloud export.)

The essential steps for mesh conversion are:

  • Set the mesh resolution (mean grid size for the volume data)
  • Generate volume data
  • Optionally, fill interior spaces to reduce triangle count (unless you want to preserve interior spaces)
  • Triangulate

Volume data is stored as a distance field to avoid voxelization, so filtering the mesh is not necessary (though it can be useful). The result is a clean mesh with twice the effective resolution that XenoDream v2.x could produce.

Volume data and meshes can be viewed from any of six directions, and there is an option to view slices of the volume data before triangulation.

There are more options after triangulating:

  • De-noising the mesh, with adjustable sharpness
  • Smoothing the mesh
  • Viewing mesh statistics of the distribution of piece sizes (and prioritizing small piece removal when simplifying)
  • Simplifying the mesh and adjusting the triangle count interactively
  • Generating vertex colors (only for OBJ and PLY formats, for programs that support it)

Here are examples of filtering:

Original mesh

De-noise Sharpness 0

De-noise Sharpness 90

Smooth, then De-noise Sharpness 0

Meshes are always created manifold (watertight with correctly oriented triangles.) When reducing the triangle count, some settings can result in non-manifold meshes, so a status indicator tells you whether the mesh is manifold.

The final step is saving the mesh to a file.