The Remeshing Plugin

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Usage
  • Basic Settings
  • Advanced Settings

Icon of the Remeshing Plugin.

Overview

The Remeshing View allows you to remesh surfaces. If done right, remeshing can dramatically increase the quality of your surface mesh. However, you might lose precision if you reduce your surface mesh too strong. Even when you keep the detail of your mesh there might be a tiny distance between your original surface and the remeshed surface. Hence, be careful when using remeshed surfaces for evaluation purposes and always keep the original versions.

Usage

Basic and advanced mode of the Remeshing View.

There are two basic and about a handful of advanced settings that influence remeshing. Most of the time you should be able to gain satisfying results by adjusting only the two basic settings or even without changing any of the default parameters. In the following the effects of all settings are described in more detail. Image examples are based on the following surface:

The surface from which all examples below originate from.

Basic Settings

The Vertices setting is the number of vertices the remeshed surface will consist of. This is exact as long as Boundary fixing is turned off (default). The maximum number of vertices is limited to the number of vertices of the input surface, however, you can increase this limit by adjusting the Max. # of vertices setting.

The Gradation setting controls the distribution of vertices in the remeshed surface. If set to zero the vertices are distributed equally all over the remeshed surface. You can push more vertices towards surface regions with high curvature, i.e., more detailed regions, by increasing this setting.

Vertex count reduced to 10 percent, gradation 0 vs. 1.

Advanced Settings

You can arbirarily increase the maximum adjustable number of vertices by changing the Max. # of vertices setting.

Edge splitting is disabled by default and might take a long time during remeshing when enabled. This setting represents a number by which the average edge length of the input surface is multiplied to serve as a threshold which regulates edge splitting. Long edges are split recursively until all edges satisfy the threshold. Edge splitting is useful for surfaces that contain thin and long polygons.

A surface that contains extremely long polygons.

A remeshing attempt without edge splitting.

Increased max. # of vertices, enabled edge splitting, followed by a second remeshing run without edge splitting.

The Subsampling setting has direct impact on the quality of the remeshed surface. The input surface is recursively subdivided until the total number of vertices exceeds its initial vertex count times this setting.

Vertex count reduced to 20 percent, subsampling 10 vs. 500.

You usually leave the Optimization level set to its default value 1. When disabled, the remeshed surface has usually a slightly smaller volume than the original surface. The optimization process minimizes the distance between the two surfaces but values higher than 1 introduce degenerated triangles to the remeshed surface.

If your surface is open, i.e., it has holes in it, boundaries tend to shrink irregularly during remeshing. If the position and smoothness of your surface boundaries are important, you should activate the Boundary fixing setting. This results in additional vertices that make up extra polygons at the remeshed boundaries to keep the original boundaries.

Vertex count reduced to 10 percent, no boundary fixing.