(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. (Based on this video tutorial by Kyle McDonald and Jason van Cleave.)

1. Render > Show Normal/Curvature

2. Filters > Point Set > Compute Normals for Point Sets
Neighbors 16
Flip Normals checked
-1000 Z

3. Filters > Sampling > Poisson-disk Sampling
Samples:5000
Base Mesh Sampling Checked

4. Filters > Point Set > Surface Reconstruction: Poisson
Octree: 12
Solver: 7

5. Filters > Remeshing > Subdivision Surfaces: LS3 Loop

6. (Optional) Filters > Cleaning > Remove Faces from Non Manifold Edges

7. Filters > Sampling > Vertex Attribute Transfer
Source: [original filename]
Target: Poisson Mesh
Transfer Geometry
Transfer Normal

8. Filters > Remeshing > Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation
Preserve Boundary
Preserve Normal
Preserve Topology

9. Filters > Cleaning > Remove Duplicate Vertex

10. Filters > Cleaning > Remove Isolated Pieces (wrt face num)