(Check out the rest of the Kinect section for more tutorials.)

At US$150, the Kinect camera is the world’s first home 3D scanner, but the point clouds it records aren’t immediately usable in 3D animation programs like Maya. Fortunately, MeshLab, a free utility for Windows, Mac, and Linux, can convert the point cloud into a mesh that you can work with.

Update: Here’s a video tutorial by Kyle McDonald.

In the Filters menu:

1. Sampling / Poisson-disk Sampling –> check Base Mesh Subsampling
…optional step. Cleans up the point cloud; skip if you want more detail.

2. Normals, Curvatures, and Orientation / Compute Normals for Point Sets
…computes the direction of the mesh faces.

3. Point Set / Poisson Reconstruction
…builds the mesh.

4. Cleaning and Repairing / Remove Isolated Pieces (wrt face num)
…deletes leftover bits outside the main mesh.

5. Remeshing, Simplification, and Reconstruction / Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation
…optional step. Cleans up the mesh.