In this video tech tip, I’m going to show you two tools that I like to use before I export a 3D scan mesh file. For this sample, I’m using a cast rotor base, and the goal is to export a mesh file that is as smooth and clean as possible. This is so that the file is easier to work with, as well as keeping the file size a bit lower. Let’s take a look at those tools now.

The first tool I like to use is the small-object filter. It runs one of two different ways. The first method is to delete everything except the largest mesh entity that’s there. This will get rid of small hanging elements such as floating pieces of data you’ll find in the example here. Alternately, you can run it so that it deletes everything below a specific polygon count. Let’s run that now. If you forgot to erase outliers before fusion, Artec Studio may solidify and preserve them in the scene as small, distant fragments. You can effectively remove these remaining outliers by using this filtering algorithm.

The next thing I like to do is under the fixed holes tab. You can see here that there are four holes in my data set. That’s not really my concern. But what I do like to do is use edge smoothing to smooth out the edges, and all the boundaries of the mesh. Let’s smooth those now. And we can see that it will do a nicer job and give us a cleaner boundary. This helps delete any curved or curled-up edges that will make it more difficult to reverse engineer the part later.

Hope these tools will give you more insight as to what works best when it comes to post-processing 3D scan data.