Using meshlab for mac#
Using meshlab software#
Using meshlab plus#

Remeshing: MeshLab has several functions for reducing the number of faces in a model without losing too many of the important details – Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation is my go-to function for this.

Check out the Screened Poisson Surface Reconstruction function if you’re interested.

Wrapping: There aren’t (to my knowledge) too many options for shrink wrapping surfaces outside of commercial codes, but MeshLab can do a pretty good job of it.

Read/Write: MeshLab reads & writes a lot of different surface mesh formats, which makes it a useful translator/checker, even if you don’t use any of the other tools.

Using meshlab plus#

The latest version was released in December 2020 & binaries are available for Windows, Mac & Linux, plus the source is available on GitHub. Like OpenFOAM, it’s not the easiest to get to grips with & there is a lot more to it than the subset of functions that I regularly use. It doesn’t seem to be optimised for any particular task (unlike Meshmixer for 3D printing) but it has a huge feature set which can deal with all sorts of surface-mesh related tasks, from cleaning & tidying to wrapping, aligning & texture mapping. MeshLab is an open-source, mesh processing tool with its roots in the Italian National Research Council. Whilst it’s good at manipulating & fixing models that originated elsewhere, it’s not so good at creating new geometry, unless you just need simple primitives or you want to sculpt something.

It’s very hard to do anything too detrimental as you can always just undo it 🙏 What’s not so good? In addition, it has an awesome undo function which is probably my most used feature. Assembling: It’s a nice environment for merging several parts into one file, especially if those parts need transformation, boolean &/or alignment ops.Thickening: Offsetting surfaces to produce a thick/solid part &/or hollowing a watertight mesh to create an inner surface.Smoothing: Brush-based tools for smoothing surfaces (including local remeshing) which are great for fixing locally-noisy scan data & reducing detail in unimportant areas.It also includes a tool that inspects your model for holes and offers one-click (or even automatic) fixes. Hole Fixing: Everything from smoothly filling large holes, down to closing cracks & welding vertices.I’m not sure if it’s still a “live” project, as it’s last release was in 2018, but the forum is still active & there’s a decent online manual.

Using meshlab for mac#

It’s available for Mac & Windows (in English & Japanese) & you can download it without having to sign up or create an account. Turns out many of the tools that 3D printing folks value are pretty handy for preparing surface meshes for snappyHexMesh, especially if you like your meshes watertight 😉

Using meshlab software#

Meshmixer is “free software for making awesome stuff” – a GUI tool from Autodesk Research that’s geared towards preparing meshes for 3D printing. You’ll need to apply your surface names in another tool (Rhino, FreeCAD, Blender etc) in order to get the most out of snappyHexMesh or cfMesh.īut don’t give up on them just yet, they both have enough tricks to make up for this flaw. MeshLab just lumps everything into one mesh with no names. You can define face groups in Meshmixer, and they get exported, but they’re called mmGroup00 or something similar.

Neither tool will export STL/OBJ files with named surfaces 😬 I’ll give you a quick overview including what I do with them, what’s good & what’s not so good.īoth of these tools share a major drawback… They’re useful for wrangling scan data, but they’re equally at home checking & fixing meshes that originated in CAD. If you use snappyHexMesh (or cfMesh) then these two recommendations have plenty of neat features that make fiddly surface mesh tasks easier & could even save the day. It’s Robin from CFD Engine and I’ve got a couple of suggestions for your CFD toolkit today – Meshmixer & MeshLab.