Build deliverables
Meshing (Poisson, clean mesh, segment meshes)
Three ways to a surface - screened Poisson for a smooth watertight shape, the clean mesher for a closed solid or an open façade with a texture baked from the cloud, and segment meshes for clean planar panels - each with an audit that says what the mesh is.
Meshing is free. Writing the mesh as glTF / GLB or USD is Pro.
Part of Gaussian splatting software, Benchmarks, Gaussian splatting to mesh.
When to use it
Poisson for objects and smooth surfaces. Mesh (clean) for rooms, buildings and scans that need a closed solid, or tick Open scan for a façade scanned from one side. Mesh Segments for a lightweight model of the flat surfaces: walls, floors, table tops.
Step by step
- For Poisson, open Process › Surface mesh (Poisson)…, choose a Fidelity (Fast, Balanced, High or Extreme, depth 6 to 9, Balanced by default) and press Reconstruct. The window gives a time estimate as you choose.
- For the clean mesher, open Process › Mesh (clean)…. Leave Open scan (single-sided) off for a closed, watertight solid; tick it for a façade or wall scanned from one side. Choose Detail: Fast (about 200 k points) or Balanced (about 500 k) and press Mesh.
- For segment meshes, segment (or classify) first, then Process › Mesh Segments: one flat polygon per planar segment.
- Read the mesh in Properties › Mesh display: Shading (Shaded, Albedo, Normals, Flat), and the Topology line, which reports holes, the largest hole’s area, and seams.
- Write the mesh with Export… in Mesh display, or File › Export segment mesh… for segment meshes:
.glb, or.usdafor a USD stage. - To go back from a mesh to points (for classification or export), use Convert to point cloud… in Mesh display or the Process menu.
What it was measured at
The clean mesher is closed, not edge-manifold, and says so: measured at 501 non-manifold edges on a 20,000-point synthetic sphere and 2,431 on a real indoor scan. Its texture is baked from the cloud into an 8K atlas.
From the command line
n3d-render-cli mesh-clean --input room.las --out room.glb # closed, textured
n3d-render-cli mesh-clean --input facade.las --out facade.glb --open # single-sided
n3d-render-cli mesh-clean --input part.las --out part.glb --poisson --depth 8
n3d-render-cli seg-mesh --input room.las --out panels.glbLimits, stated
- Poisson uses at most 800,000 points, a uniform subset of larger clouds.
- No mesh decimation and no manifold repair are built; OBJ is not written.
- Closed mode seals unobserved space by flood fill. A room with an open door is closed across the door; use Open scan when that is wrong.
Related questions
Is the clean mesh manifold?
It is closed, not edge-manifold, and N3D says so. Dual contouring puts one vertex per cell, and where two sheets of surface pass through one cell that vertex serves both: measured at 501 non-manifold edges on a 20,000-point sphere and 2,431 on a real indoor scan. The mesh audit reports boundary edges, non-manifold edges, shells and genus.
Can it simplify a mesh or write OBJ?
No. There is no mesh decimation, and OBJ is read-only. Meshes are written as glTF / GLB.
Can it repair a mesh into a manifold?
No. Manifold repair is not built. The mesh audit measures and reports the defect instead of claiming it away.
More in the FAQ.
Related guides
segment column for every point.
Models, splats and video
USD, IFC and STEP models
Open a USD stage fully composed (references, payloads, variants, prototypes and instancing resolved), an IFC building or a STEP part, switch components on and off, fly to any of them, and measure a scan against the model’s surface.
Deliver
Export a point cloud (LAS, PLY, CSV, USD, web)
One dialog for every point cloud export - format, subsample, colours, label columns and scalar fields - with a LAS writer that puts the class in the classification byte and every id in an exact 32-bit extra byte.