Mesh from Clouds
Both course and fine general meshes can be built from any point cloud or combination of point clouds. It requires a instrument association but does not require a scan stripe cloud as an input. To built a general mesh either right-click on a cloud directly or use the command Mesh from Clouds in the Build from Clouds section of the Clouds and Surfaces tab. This will open the mesh settings dialog.
General Meshes only offer 2 parameters:
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Maximum Triangle Size. This value defined the resolution of the resulting mesh by defining the size of the triangles used. The small the max triangle size, the finer the mesh.
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Smallest Hole Diameter. This value controls the size of the gaps within a mesh that are bridge or covered. With this value very small the mesh will have lots of holes. But with a large value, holes that are actually there within the mesh could be covered over in the meshing process.
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Finalize. The finalize check box is used to build a finalized mesh. This takes much longer and produces a much more optimized mesh when the mesh is generated.
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Use Scan Direction For Point Normals. This option allows the normals saved in a Scan Stripe Cloud to be used to help orient the normals of mesh segments. However, when combing clouds, or meshing scans performed with many passes from different directions, this may not be helpful. The positive side of the mesh needs to be oriented correctly for correct probe compensation.
The Reverse Mesh Normals button can be used to reverse the normal of a mesh for accurate probe offset compensation. However, it should be noted that breaks in the mesh can cause local segment reversals. The Extended Parameter Mesh is much more resistant to these because it uses the scan line probing vectors.
For basic meshing of point data the General Mesh can also be used. For example if you wish to build a 2D mesh built from all of the measured points as the vetex points for the mesh you can do so by entering 0 in both the mesh parameters.