Blog
Friday, September 19. 20083D file format conversion and cleanup with MeshLab
Q: How many people are working on MeshLab? Who are they? A: I have never exactly counted them before now  . According to Ohloh.net at least 42 people committed code to the base, but the real number is probably a bit larger. Students often work in pairs and sometimes they perform all the commits are done with a single account. Most of the developers are students that work on a very focused task for a limited period of time and then maintain it over the time.In the last year a few other very talented developers from all over the world have freely joined to the MeshLab team in the classical wonderful Open Source spirit. I wish to warmly thank them for their precious and significant contributions. Q: Are there any features that are unique to MeshLab and that aren't offered by other (commercial) programs? A: Initially not so many, probably the users liked a lot the surface simplification tool that is really robust and fast (according to many users much better and faster that the one that you can find in the High-End package like 3ds max, or maya). Now very recently developed CG techniques are being dropped in. I wrote that code more or less 10 years ago, and it was used as basis to the out of core system that simplified the huge Digital Michelangelo Project models. Also 3D scanning pipeline (alignment and merging) is rather good. It has a rather rough interface but its core is very good. The core of that library was used too in a lot of famous projects, Just to cite one, it was used to align and merge the meshes of the Parthenon Project of Paul Debevec. In general the capability of working with very large unstructured meshes is rather rare in most 3D packages. By the way I think that its overall goal of mostly unattended processing, is something that make MeshLab very distinct from most of the other 3D packages that are more oriented on the design/edit/build paradigm. Q: Which new features can we expect in the near future? A: More mesh formats supported, More filters, new algorithms for cleaning meshes, tools for offsetting surfaces, more controllable hole filling, retopology tools, new merging algorithms, a lot of stuff for managing color over meshes, expression parsing in the parameters, and finally a command line version of MeshLab for unattended pipelined processing of meshes. In a not so near future, MeshLab will have a really well integrated undo, a redesign of its gui (i got tired of floating windows), and eventually a bit of scriptability. cheers Paolo Downloading MeshLabDownload MeshLab here. On the download page, click 'download' and select the right version for your system:
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