CloudCompare forum

Hi,

I've got a question concerning the tool mesh -> measure volume. I’d like to measure the volume of small objects using structure from motion. After generating the mesh with another software I open the mesh with CloudCompare and then prepare it for the measurement: edit normal, poisson surface reconstruction, scaling (by a reference distance). Finally I’d like to measure the volume of the mesh.
Are these the right steps? Has anybody already done this? Do you think this method achieves good results?

Thanks for your help!

When you say 'generating the mesh', you mean 'generating the point cloud'?

Because if you already have a (closed) triangular mesh then you don't need to use Poisson Reconstruction. And if you have a mesh with holes, then you can use Meshlab or a similar tool to close the holes.

Otherwise if you have a cloud this is the standard way to go. Once you get a closed mesh you can compute its volume with 'Mesh > Measure volume'. I and several others did this before. The accuracy of the method depends directly on the quality of the resulting mesh of course.

Thanks for your help!
The output of the first software should be a textured mesh but it has holes in it.
So I thought poisson surface reconstruction would close the holes.

Indeed you can do it this way. Make sur you have per-vertex normals thanks to the original mesh - compute them if necessary with CC - and then apply the Poisson Reconstruction plugin on the mesh vertices.

However it may be simpler/faster to simply close the holes with Meshlab :D.