Updated free mesh fixer available on Autodesk Labs

Project Memento is a free technology preview available on Autodesk Labs. Project Memento provides a state of the art toolset that visualizes huge meshes from laser scans, photos, or any modeling application. It also automatically analyzes meshes for errors and allows users to easily fix them for digital use or fabrication. On Sunday the team provided me with an updated build that I added to the project. You can download it and try it for yourself.

Join the project.

Tatjana Dzambazova is the Product Manager and champion of Project Memento. Tatjana documented what was in this new build.

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What's NEW in the September update of Project Memento

Discoverability:

• Revamped UI - menu system, action, and tool panel and task dialogs.
• Mesh Analytics improvements that give more control to the mesh fixing. Now has also an option to analyze the mesh just for 3D printing (and ignore all other errors that are not an obstacle for 3D printing).

New or Improved Tools:

• Set units/size – ability to set scale to the meshes generated with photogrammetry that don't have a scale by defining two points of the mesh and typing in the exact distance and units.
• Reporting: Measure distance and surface that are real time updated with any size change.
• Surface Smooth tool – for fixing the surface of the mesh where needed. This tool allows for stronger edits and is controlled with brush size and strength. (Tip: If you want the smooth tool to act like a sculpting tool, reduce the scale of the object temporarily.)
• Slice tool – now more powerful; gives more control to position the slice tool by using three reference points that define a cut/slice plane with option to fill the cut or leave it open. (This is a work in progress.)
• Face - New selection method for easier selection of individual triangles of a mesh without the need to resize the brush tool.
• In-canvas decimation - for better predictability of how the decimated mesh will look like before export.

Import:

• .PLY – a 3D scanner format. In this release, only mesh .PLY’s can be imported.

Export:

• .PLY – a 3D scanner format. In this release, only mesh .PLY’s can be exported. Point cloud .PLYs will be added later.
• .FBX (with displacement maps, normal maps, texture maps).
• Texture re-projection (only with FBX export) to a single-tile.
• .OBJ with quads.

3D Print:

• New 3D printers added to the list of 3D printers to select from in the 3D print environment.

Figure 1 - New UI for better discoverability

With the new option to export to .OBJ with Quads in Memento, we enabled a tighter integration with a Fusion 360 workflow: import the exported .OBJ in Fusion 360 by clicking on the Insert tool and select Insert Mesh. You can work directly with the quad mesh or by converting the quad mesh to T-splines (select Modify, Convert in Fusion), and you can start editing and changing the digitized real object much easier, with more control; edit change, and add details only where needed, create non-rectangular topology and stay compatible with NURBS surfaces.

Figure 2 - The gray model is the imported quad mesh. The yellow is the quad mesh that has been converted to T-splines.

Finally, with the new export to FBX that includes options to bake in normals, texture, and displacement map, Project Memento is now capable of delivering high quality visual models that are very light in polygon count (as demanded by many VR/AR solutions for Web apps or games). Given that meshes generated from reality capture are huge, and their size gives a hard time to almost all modeling applications, these new options make the work with digitized reality content in applications such as Autodesk Maya and Autodesk Mudbox much more convenient by generating lighter models in polygon count that still look like models with high details.

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Thanks Tatjana.

So keep the feedback coming. You can reach the team in a variety of ways.

email

forum

blog

youtube

The release-feedback-update cycle is alive in the lab.