Voxel image stack and then what?

[DarkBeam]

I have done some test with fiji and zbrush. Zbrush does milions of polygons without problems.
The next step would be to do it in colors.  

http://img338.imageshack.us/slideshow/webplayer.php?id=94294951.jpg

 

[bib]

Yes, nice slideshow

[Rama]

Cool! That's a nice collection of objects, Rama! Vue 10 Infinite can handle billions of polygons, so that's not the problem. The problem is the filesize of an object. When I import an object with a filesize bigger than 300MB it's getting hard to move it about in a scene.

Yes indeed.
I tried vue 10 and had the same problem.
Next I want to try optimising the mesh, unrap it and create normal maps.
I will let you know how that goes...

[Don Whitaker]

Those look great, Rama!

I've been using fiji and Zbrush as well. I still need to experiment to see how much detail I can convince fiji to render. So far I have had good luck with 900 pixel stacks. I'm having fun texturing and squeezing some of them down to low-poly game assets.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/OrC2_I474ZM&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/OrC2_I474ZM&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

Does anyone have any tips on minimizing memory use with fiji? I'm basically using the steps that Teena described earlier. I keep thinking that the RGB versions of the images are hoggin memory. has anybody found a way to maybe do it in grayscale and save that mem for larger images?

[Rama]

Cool !

I have been successful at up 1250.
At 1500 the obj can be 1gb plus in size and zbrush can't take it. I have 16gb of ram .

[Don Whitaker]

I have a 4GB, Win7 64bit system. Largest I've managed so far was an 800 MB .obj, 23 million polys.  There was SO much detail inside that one. I think that Zbrush can only use 4GB of RAM, even on a 64bit OS, and maxes out at around 25 million polys in one subtool - so we are already pushing the limits there.

[Teena]

I like it, Don, I like it! 

I tried different things to get a mesh from the slices using Fiji. When I convert the slices to grayscale I don't get a mesh. When I save such a grayscale stack as a PGM file I get a PGM picture and no PNM file. That PNM file seems to be the only format that can be converted to a mesh in Fiji. I created a PNM file the way I described in my little tutorial and when I converted it to OBJ I selected just one of the three RGB channels hoping to decrease the filesize. It didn't work.

In some cases you seem to get a slightly more detailed mesh when for instance rendering 400x400 slices saving the final object using a resampling factor of 1 instead of using 800x800 slices with the resampling factor set to 2. The filesize is about the same. However, it doesn't always work that way.

I didn't check out the filesize limit that Vue can import without crashing but in my case it makes no sense to create monster files. I was planning to use fractal objects in some fantasy or science fiction scenes. That wouldn't be possible with an object of 1GB.

Rama's idea to create a highly detailed normal map and use it on a lower poly version of the same fractal sounds good but I don't know how to achieve that. I'm looking forward to hear more from him about this method.

[blob]

Relatively decent ( I think) low poly bulb (viewed in meshman with flat shading). It's just around 5.6MB and 150.000 polys and processed in Meshlab (laplacian smooth and quadric edge collapse decimation) from an around 160MB and 5M polys obj mesh produced with MVE-2 using marchingtetra6 out of a 300³ png stack from M3D.

[Don Whitaker]

Rama's idea to create a highly detailed normal map and use it on a lower poly version of the same fractal sounds good but I don't know how to achieve that. I'm looking forward to hear more from him about this method.

I've been trying this as well. All the objects in my video above have lo-res versions with hires textures and normal maps. I'm certainly no master at the technique, but I'm pretty happy with the results. I have some photos of those posted on my Google+ account - http://DonWhitaker.com. 

I've had some success with processing the greyscale images in Fiji. Here's what I did - same as Teena's steps except:

• When importing image stack, do not check the Convert to RGB
• When saving as OBJ. Check the R, but uncheck G and B.
• Set the Threshhold to 0

I've been able to process a 900 pixel stack using Resampling Factor at 1 - which I was not able to do using RGB.

[slon_ru]

I don't understand how can i make obj with MVE-2.
blob, can you make small tutorial ? Please :$.
Thx!

[Sockratease]

I don't understand how can i make obj with MVE-2.
blob, can you make small tutorial ? Please :$.
Thx!

Yes, please.

I can't even start MVE-2, let alone use it!

I do ok with fiji, but would like to explore all options 

[blob]

Sockratease, I am not sure why you can't start the application, it requires the microsoft .net framework to be installed on your machine, if you don't have this it won't run.

Anyway attached is the best/easiest tuto I could make for you guys, if you don't get it to work with that, then I don't know what more to do.

 

[slon_ru]

Thx! But it crashed by me

Description:
  Stopped working

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:   CLR20r3
  Problem Signature 01:   mapeditor.exe
  Problem Signature 02:   1.0.3764.22183
  Problem Signature 03:   4bd030bf
  Problem Signature 04:   Testing
  Problem Signature 05:   1.0.3764.22187
  Problem Signature 06:   4bd030c7
  Problem Signature 07:   52
  Problem Signature 08:   72
  Problem Signature 09:   Zcu.Mve.Core.MveException
  OS Version:   6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1
  Locale ID:   1049

[blob]

Sorry to hear that, all I can suggest is you reinstall dotnet and/or try other versions of MVE-2.

Each one its own issues I guess, I get ImageJ/Fiji to crash in nvopengl.dll when I use the 3D viewer, not fatal but annoying enough so that I am not using it.

[pedroasecas]

Don, thanks for the R channel only tip. I was using rgb stacks too and looking for a way to use just one component.

I'm using another tool aside from Fiji, Imagevis3D, that works well with monochrome stacks, up to 800^3 in my case. It takes a folder of images as input and is able to output OBJ or PLY meshes in various levels of detail. It needs a slightly beefier gfx card than Fiji though, with OpenGL 2.0 support. The mesh export options are located in the Workspace > Isosurface settings menu.

If anyone is interested, the stable release can be found at http://www.sci.utah.edu/download/imagevis3d.html, and a development build at http://www.sci.utah.edu/devbuilds/imagevis3d/. The windows installers are down the page, named ImageVis3D-Latest-(32 or 64)bit-installer.exe. If you have trouble running the dev build, use the stable one for the time being and check back in a few days for a new version (it was crashing a lot here until a couple of days ago).

Hope it helps.