Hello, 

I'm Leon and we are working on the project that involves 3d scanning with a drone. We've made 2 flight attempts so far and got pretty good scans but the problem is that STL files are so huge, 350+mb at least. What steps can be taken to reduce the size of 3D scans without significant loss of quality? We've never faced a problem like this before - in fact, all our efforts were aimed at improving the quality of 3d scans. Would you mind enlightening me? Does changing the file format reduce its size? Our software can export STL, OBJ and other formats (https://www.artec3d.com/3d-software/artec-studio#compare-studios). Is there any 3D application that can decrease the quality of 3D model textures? We may try to make another flight and "split" a 3D scan into several parts, but I'm not sure it will work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Regards.

Hi @Leon Norris,

 

In order to prepare yourself to much bigger trouble, read this thread first.

Judging by the size of your file, you'll have to do lots and lots of decimation first before even succeeding in importing into PVSOL.

If your software doesn't support decimation and you don't want to spend lots of money, I recommend the freeware MeshLab, it does a decent job at this.

Going back to the thread above, please remember you'll have to get bellow ~400k vertices to be able to import into PVSOL - your scan will get very low quality.

Use .obj file format, it's the best one to import in PVSOL according to VS, and I do recommend you use .png for the texture file format, we found problems when using .jpg.

GOOD LUCK!