CompuServe Messages

Sam, Please don't take any of this stuff too personally. I'm definately not a medical person and have little or no knowledge of the medical profession or medical needs. Then again, by asking about pricing the skeleton on the Autodesk forum you're not exactly dealing with the AMA. Half of the stuff you asked about the skull is way beyond my knowledge. 🙂 I do however know a little bit about digitizing and meshes. With an investment approaching a quarter of a million dollars in hardware and software solely for scanning, we're fairly serious about mesh quality and usefulness. Our digitizing tends to be for only in-house visulization projects and we've been doing some custom work for several research facilities. The reason I popped into the thread was because when you posted the original message you mentioned laser scanning, custom code, proprietary software and unequalled resolution, 5 people/ 2years. While I'm not interested in yet another skeleton to add to our collections, I am interested in people/ organizations performing state of the art custom work. After downloading the mesh, I was struck by several things: a.) The mesh is almost definately not a laser scan product. The resolution isn't even in the ballpark. The circular patterns on the round areas are indicative of a stylus based digitizer. b.) The data is not as well defined or decimated as it could be. If custom tools were used to decimate the data, it is amazing that the final data is identical to triangulated pick point meshes. In dispersing the point cloud, the arrangement of the triangulated mesh could have been done alot better, leaving you with more data in essential points and less data in non-essential areas. Will Schroeder at GE Corporate Research and Development has written a number of papers and collaborated on a number of projects that could drastically aid your project in the area of point cloud decimation. [>> Continued in next msg]