Smoothing Meshes

You can smooth a mesh to avoid very noisy scans produced from planar sections, segmentation, or the reconstruction of wavy curves or surfaces and/or of very high order.

Imported cloud of points can be noisy for various reasons, mainly because of a poor digitalization accuracy on the edges of parts. This noise is found again on the meshes computed from these clouds of points or imported in STL format.

Before you begin:
  • Since the volume of the part is reduced, some small facets may be inverted by the meshing.
    Recommendation: Alternate Mesh Smoothing and Flip Edges.
  • Use Activate to process only a portion of a cloud.
See Also
Preparing Meshes
Flipping Edges
Activating a Portion of a Cloud of Points
  1. From the Digitized Data section of the action bar, click Mesh Smoothing .
  2. Select a mesh with manifold edges.
  3. Select the type of smoothing:
    • Select Single effect if there is no sharp edge on the mesh to process. Small radii are erased. The volume of the part is reduced (contraction towards the center of gravity of the part).
    • Select Dual effect to reduce the distance between outliers and the surface, and reduce the erasing of small radii.

      The reduction of the volume of the part is smaller. A large displacement of one vertex inwards may cause the neighboring vertices to move outwards.

  4. Set Coefficient to balance the effect of the new theoretical position in comparison with the original position. It varies from 0 (the vertex is not moved) to 1 (the vertex is moved to the computed position).
  5. Select Max Deviation check box to keep the displacement under the set value.

    The deviation is the distance between a vertex and its initial position (not between its current position and that of the previous iteration). Therefore, if you want to control the maximum deviation, select the Max Deviation check box before the first Apply (it is no longer available after the first Apply).

    Note: For a better appreciation of the quality of the intermediate meshes, the meshes are displayed in Flat Shading inside Mesh Smoothing. In addition, for each step the maximum and the mean deviations (distances between a vertex and its initial position) are displayed in the dialog box.

  6. Click Apply.

    Mesh Smoothing is iterative: Click Apply again to smooth the proposed mesh.

    A new mesh is computed.

A Smoothing.x element is created, the original mesh is sent to the No Show.

Example of the same part, with different parameters:

  • Original part in Smooth Shading:

  • Original part as you enterMesh Smoothing, i.e. in Flat Shading:

  • Single effect, in Flat Shading:

  • Single effect, in Smooth Shading (after exiting Mesh Smoothing):

  • Dual effect, in Flat Shading:

  • Dual effect, in Smooth Shading (after exiting Mesh Smoothing):