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Combine Planar Features

This button searches through the existing bodies and combines any facets that are both parallel and connected to each other. The surfaces need to be exactly parallel and there cannot be a gap between neighboring items (otherwise they are considered a separate surface). Use of planar feature detection is useful for cases where the data is inherently geometric (i.e. a lot of flat surfaces and regular shapes). Cases that are 'organic' in nature (people's faces, toys, 3D scans in general) often do not contain parallel facets that lend themselves to this process. Though the combination can be used for cases like that and sometimes yield a small benefit, it is not suggested to be used for those cases.

Degeneracy Check

During import (provided that the settings have not been changed to ignore this step), the data is checked for issues and if appropriate, basic corrections are made such as deleting facets that are exact duplicates, facets that have no surface area (if all three points lie on a line). If this import check has been disabled to get a better understanding of the data or to fix an issue, the check can be repeated with this tool. Additionally, it also provides a way to remove facets that are only attached by one of their three edges (called Winged Facets) which are otherwise ignored.

Query Data

The underlying data can be displayed in a way that shows the facets, edges and vertices in a tree view where facets can be further broken down into their edges which in turn are defined through two vertices each of which has a location. Use of this tool is for specific purposes where the information is otherwise not readily available. It should be noted that for large models, the gathering and display of the data can cause the computer to crash. Options such as 'Clip' (showing only the values given in the input fields) and/or 'Children' which limits the selection to a subset of the items below the top level item are intended to reduce the chance of the application crashing though it is strongly suggested that these features are first experimented with prior to using them for a specific task. Modifying the data in this dialog allows a low level interaction with the bodies that have been loaded.

Surface Repair

The surface repair tool opens in a separate window and is intended to aid in the manipulation and correction of data that contains errors. A detailed description on its use is given on the Surface Repair page.

Align Normals

This tool checks neighboring facets for normals that are not aligned correctly and switches them if issues are found. The tool will only succeed in correcting normals in some cases.

Flip Normals

This tool allows the normals to be switched as an entire group. This is useful if the originating application uses normals to define the interior of the body rather than the exterior. Changing the configuration settings also allows the application to either switch all normals of all loaded bodies or only those of the selected body.

Patch Holes

In some cases holes are present in the data that has been loaded. In order for the application to correctly identify a hole as one, the edges around the hole must form a continuous line and cannot contain pinch points which are locations where the end of one edge (which is only used by one facet) meets the end of two other open edges.

Inflate Surface

Some application do not generate solid data directly. Often 3D scanners will only generate the data for the surface that is facing the scanner and leave the bottom undefined. Rather than manually generating the missing data, this tool allows the shell surface to be thickened by a small amount to generate a thin, solid body. See the Inflate Surface page for more information on its use.