I recently got started with CGAL for implementing some models which required 2D and 3D periodic regular triangulations (weighted Delaunay or power diagram). I have made some progress with the 3D periodic regular triangulations with this class.
But I couldn't any similar class from CGAL for the 2D case and since I am new to the CGAL package, I am quite unsure on how to adapt the existing code database to help me with my case. Any help with adapting the code or pointers to the packages which can help me with implementing 2D Periodic regular triangulations will be appreciated!
There is currently no Periodic_2_regular_triangulation_2 class, and it is not straightforward to adapt Periodic_2_triangulation_2 to add weights. It is incidentally being done in https://github.com/CGAL/cgal/pull/4914 because that pull request completely rewrites Periodic_2_triangulation_2 in a way that will make it easy to add a weighted version, but this is WIP and without any ETA (I am missing time to finish it).
A possible way to go around that limitation would be to add a "fake" third dimension (z = 0) to your 2D data and use a weighted, periodic 3D triangulation?
Related
I've been successfully testing CGAL Efficient RANSAC using this provided example to detect planes in a point cloud. The only piece missing from the CGAL Efficient RANSAC examples is a way to write the detected planes into a mesh (something like what polyfit offers at the end of this example)
I've noted that I can use the planes() method from Efficient_RANSAC to get an iterator of Plane but I'm a bit lost after that. Do I need to read all points from each plane and try and manually create a mesh from it ?
Thanks in advance for any help
I'm working on a project to detect the position and orientation of a paper plane.
To collect the data, I'm using an Intel Realsense D435, which gives me accurate, clean depth data to work with.
Now I arrived at the problem of detecting the 2D paper plane silhouette from the 3D point cloud data.
Here is an example of the data (I put the plane on a stick for testing, this will not be in the final implementation):
https://i.stack.imgur.com/EHaEr.gif
Basically, I have:
A 3D point cloud with points on the plane
A 2D shape of the plane
I would like to calculate what rotations/translations are needed to align the 2D shape to the 3D point cloud as accurate as possible.
I've searched online, but couldn't find a good way to do it. One way would be to use Iterative Closest Point (ICP) to first take a calibration pointcloud of the plane in a known orientation, and align it with the current orientation. But from what I've heard, ICP doesn't perform well if the pointclouds aren't kind of already closely aligned at the start.
Any help is appreciated! Coding language doesn't matter.
Does your 3d point cloud have outliers? How many in what way?
How did you use ICP exactly?
One way would be using ICP, with a hand-crafted initial guess using
pcl::transformPointCloud (*cloud_in, *cloud_icp, transformation_matrix);
(to mitigate the problem that ICP needs to be close to work.)
What you actually want is the plane-model that describes the position and orientation of your point-cloud right?
A good estimator of your underlying function can be found with: pcl::ransac
pcl::ransace model consensus
You can then get the computedModel coefficents.
Now finding the correct transformation is just: How to calculate transformation matrix from one plane to another?
I have a very fine mesh (STL) of some organic shapes (e.g., a bone) and would like to convert it to a few patches of NURBS, which will be much smoother with reasonable simplification.
I can do this manually with Solidworks ScanTo3D function, but it is not scriptable. It's a pain when I need to do hundreds of them.
Would there be a way to automate it, e.g., with some open source libraries available? I am perfectly fine with quite some loss in accuracy. I use mainly Python, but I don't mind if it is in other languages and I can work my way around it.
Note that one thing I'd like to avoid is to convert an STL of 10,000 triangles to a NURBS with 10,000 patches. I'd like to automatically (programmatically, could be with some parameter tunings) divide the mesh into a few patches and then fit it. Again, I'm perfect fine with quite some loss in accuracy.
Converting an arbitrary mesh to nurbs is not easy in general. What is a good nurbs surface for a given mesh depends on the use case. Do you want to manually edit the nurbs surface afterwards? Should symmetric structures or other features be recognized and represented correctly in the nurbs body? Is it important to keep the volume of the body? Are there boundary lines that should not be simplified as they change the appearance or angles that must be kept?
If you just want to smooth the mesh or reduce the amount of vertices there are easier ways like mesh reduction and mesh smoothing.
If you require your output to be nurbs there are different methods leading to different topologies and approximations like indicated above. A commonly used method for object simplification is to register the mesh to some handmade prototype and then perform some smaller changes to shape the specific instance. If there are for example several classes of shapes like bones, hearts, livers etc. it might be possible to model a prototype nurbs body for each class once which defines the average appearance and topology of that organ. Each instance of a class can then be converted to a nurbs by fitting the prototype to that instance. As the topology is fixed the optimization problem is reduced to the problem where we need to find the control points that approximate the mesh with the smallest error.Disadvantage of this method is that you have to create a prototype for each class. The advantage is that the topology will be nice and easily editable.
Another approach would be to first smooth the mesh and reduce the polygon count (there are libraries available for mesh reduction) and then simply converting each triangle/ quad to a nurbs patch (like the Rhino MeshToNurb Command). This method should be easier to implement but the resulting nurbs body could have an ugly topology.
If one of this methods is applicable really depends on what you want to do with your transformed data.
Background
I'm working on a project where a user gets scanned by a Kinect (v2). The result will be a generated 3D model which is suitable for use in games.
The scanning aspect is going quite well, and I've generated some good user models.
Example:
Note: This is just an early test model. It still needs to be cleaned up, and the stance needs to change to properly read skeletal data.
Problem
The problem I'm currently facing is that I'm unsure how to place skeletal data inside the generated 3D model. I can't seem to find a program that will let me insert the skeleton in the 3D model programmatically. I'd like to do this either via a program that I can control programmatically, or adjust the 3D model file in such a way that skeletal data gets included within the file.
What have I tried
I've been looking around for similar questions on Google and StackOverflow, but they usually refer to either motion capture or skeletal animation. I know Maya has the option to insert skeletons in 3D models, but as far as I could find that is always done by hand. Maybe there is a more technical term for the problem I'm trying to solve, but I don't know it.
I do have a train of thought on how to achieve the skeleton insertion. I imagine it to go like this:
Scan the user and generate a 3D model with Kinect;
1.2. Clean user model, getting rid of any deformations or unnecessary information. Close holes that are left in the clean up process.
Scan user skeletal data using the Kinect.
2.2. Extract the skeleton data.
2.3. Get joint locations and store as xyz-coordinates for 3D space. Store bone length and directions.
Read 3D skeleton data in a program that can create skeletons.
Save the new model with inserted skeleton.
Question
Can anyone recommend (I know, this is perhaps "opinion based") a program to read the skeletal data and insert it in to a 3D model? Is it possible to utilize Maya for this purpose?
Thanks in advance.
Note: I opted to post the question here and not on Graphics Design Stack Exchange (or other Stack Exchange sites) because I feel it's more coding related, and perhaps more useful for people who will search here in the future. Apologies if it's posted on the wrong site.
A tricky part of your question is what you mean by "inserting the skeleton". Typically bone data is very separate from your geometry, and stored in different places in your scene graph (with the bone data being hierarchical in nature).
There are file formats you can export to where you might establish some association between your geometry and skeleton, but that's very format-specific as to how you associate the two together (ex: FBX vs. Collada).
Probably the closest thing to "inserting" or, more appropriately, "attaching" a skeleton to a mesh is skinning. There you compute weight assignments, basically determining how much each bone influences a given vertex in your mesh.
This is a tough part to get right (both programmatically and artistically), and depending on your quality needs, is often a semi-automatic solution at best for the highest quality needs (commercial games, films, etc.) with artists laboring over tweaking the resulting weight assignments and/or skeleton.
There are algorithms that get pretty sophisticated in determining these weight assignments ranging from simple heuristics like just assigning weights based on nearest line distance (very crude, and will often fall apart near tricky areas like the pelvis or shoulder) or ones that actually consider the mesh as a solid volume (using voxels or tetrahedral representations) to try to assign weights. Example: http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/11/volumetric-heat-diffusion-skinning/
However, you might be able to get decent results using an algorithm like delta mush which allows you to get a bit sloppy with weight assignments but still get reasonably smooth deformations.
Now if you want to do this externally, pretty much any 3D animation software will do, including free ones like Blender. However, skinning and character animation in general is something that tends to take quite a bit of artistic skill and a lot of patience, so it's worth noting that it's not quite as easy as it might seem to make characters leap and dance and crouch and run and still look good even when you have a skeleton in advance. That weight association from skeleton to geometry is the toughest part. It's often the result of many hours of artists laboring over the deformations to get them to look right in a wide range of poses.
I am looking for an algorithm that receives a 3d surface mesh (i.e comprised of 3d triangles that are a discretization of some manifold) and generates tetrahedra inside the mesh's volume.
i.e, I want the 3d equivalent to this 2d problem: given a closed curve, triangulate it's interior.
I am sorry if this is unclear, it's the best way I could think of explaining it.
For the 2d case there's Triangle. For a 3d case I could find none.
pygalmesh (a project of mine based on CGAL) can do just that.
pygalmesh-volume-from-surface elephant.vtu out.vtk --cell-size 1.0 --odt
https://github.com/nschloe/pygalmesh/#volume-meshes-from-surface-meshes
I found GRUMMP which seems to answer all the needs mentioned in the question, and more...
I haven't had any experience using GRUMMP, but as far as a 3D version of triangle there is tetgen. If you know the triangle switches it is built to resemble it. It also has fairly decent documentation and a python wrapper for it and triangle.
http://wias-berlin.de/software/tetgen/
http://mathema.tician.de/software/meshpy/