Extract contour from obj 3d object in Matlab - matlab

I have an .obj file representing a 3D object.
I need to extract from this 3D object the contour that is obtained by intersection with a plane. So for example, I have an object representing a cylinder oriented with vertical axis, then I want to extract a circle contour when the intersecting plane is horizontal or a rectangular contour when the intersection plane is vertical. Any suggestion about how to do it?
Since I didn't know how to visualise this obj file, I have converted to a patch with the following code (some function taken from loadawobj from Matlab file exchange).
modelname='file.obj';
S=loadawobj(modelname);
mtl=loadawmtl(['obj/' S.mtllib]);
p3=patch('Vertices',S.v','Faces',S.f3');
for ii=1:length(S.umat3)
mtlnum=S.umat3(ii);
fvcd3(ii,:)=mtl(1).Kd';
end
p3.FaceVertexCData=fvcd3;
p3.FaceColor='flat';
But I don't necessarily need to extract the contour from the resulting patch if this is too complex to accomplish. If there is an easier procedure starting from the obj file, it's also fine and acceptable. Thank you!

That's the way I solved the problem, after collecting information all around the web. I couldn't find anything ready on line so I had to implement an algorithm on my own. The basic idea is very simple but there are many steps required. I start from two info: one array containing the coordinates of the cloud point and another array containing a bunch of tuples about how the 3 vertex are connected to form a triangle.
First of all you need to find a representation of the plane you want to use for your cutting. That means you just use one point and the normal to the plane to represent it. That plane is required in order to identify the cutting point on the structure.
Second step is to identify the triangles on the plane. In few words you just need to scroll over all the triangles of the structure and find those having one corner above the cutting plane and another corner below the cutting plane. Also don't forget to account for the condition where one corner is on the plane or two are on the plane. All the other triangles are not needed, since they are totally above or below the cutting plane.
Now you have a subset of all your triangles. You need to extract points of the contour. So for each triangle you have 3 vertex: in general case you can imagine that one vertex is above the plane and the other two are below. Then you have two lines cutting the plane. You can extract two point by simply intersecting these lines with the cutting plane.
By repeating this operation you get a series of points on 2D space. But they have no order and if you plot them as a continuous plot, you get lines jumping up and down since the points you have extracted are randomly located in the array. So, it's required to order them in a proper way. The method I used is the very simple: start from one point and connect to the closest one. There are some bad situations where that doesn't work but you can probably avoid it by adding some more rules on the algorithm.

Related

Placing labels evenly along curved 3D mesh

I have a single mesh game object that is essentially a long line that curves and slopes up/down. What I'm trying to do is generate some text along this line at a specified distance interval. Let's say every 100 units along the line some text should appear. If it was a straight line it would be easy, but the curves and slopes are throwing me off.
I retrieved the vertices that created this mesh by doing:
model.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().mesh.vertices
I then transform them to world-space by looping over them and doing:
meshFilter.gameObject.transform.TransformPoint(vertices[i])
Now, these vertices are NOT evenly spaced. For slopes and curves, there are a lot of vertices. For the straighter parts, there are less. But these straight parts still vary slightly (usually by ~.10 of the Y value). Originally I was looping through and keeping track of the distance to find the vertices closest to the interval, but that was when I thought they were evenly spaced.
Here's part of the model:
I colored all the vertices black here to show how condensed they are at curves/slopes vs ~straight parts:
Here's the inspector for the model just incase:
Do you use a static single mesh?
In your solution, I think the problem is vertices. you have to find vertices along your line and ignore the vertical group of them and its too difficult.
If your mesh may be changed by player, I suggest you to use Trail Render Component, get its vertices and solve a simple Knapsack problem to put your characters (suggest you use TextmeshPro)

Crop 3D Mesh with plane Cut in Matlab

I have made 3D analysis code and I want to split or crop 3D mesh into 2 parts with 2D plane, what i expected: the final result I need is to find out what are the nodes on the left side and the right side, what you see on the image below is the nodes of the 3D object (bumpy), Do you know what method or library I need to use to solve this problem?
my problem
Here is my data structure from the 2D plane:
Column 1: Face
Column 2: X coordinate
Column 3: Y coordinate
column 4: Z coordinate
Column 5: Finite Element Value
data structure
.
The data structure from the 3D mesh is containing the same data as the table above, Thanks so much!
We can know the plane XYZ Coordinates, so I tried to find by using <= to find the axis value is larger or smaller than the plane coordinates:
find x,y,z 3D model coordinate is smaller than x,y,z cut plane coordinate
[r] = find((Name_OT(:,1)>=x) & (Name_OT(:,2)>=y) & Name_OT(:,3)>=z);
the blue line is the plane, and the coloured one is the result from my code, the ideal result is the coloured nodes full, but what happened here the colour node has a big hole or gap
not good result
You need to first decide whether you want to segment your data by a (linear) plane or not. If you prefer to keep a curved surface, please follow my earlier comment and edit your question.
To get a plane fit to the data for your cut, you can use fit.
Base on the plane, you can get a normal vector of the plane. That is reading coefficients of fit results and is in the documentation. Using that normal vector, you can rotate all your data so that the plane is normal to z axis. The rotation is matrix multiplication. From there, you can use logical indexing to segment your data set.
You can ofc also get the normal component of the data points relative to the plane cut and decide on a direction that way. You still need fit. From that point, it's basic matrix manipulation. An nx1 vector can multiply a 1xn vector in Matlab. So projectors can also be constructed from basic matrix manipulation. At a glance, this method is computationally inefficient.

Constructing voxels of a 3D cube in MATLAB

I want to construct a 3D cube in MATLAB. I know that the units of any 3D shape are voxels not pixels. Here is what I want to do,
First, I want to construct a cube with some given dimensions x, y, and z.
Second, according to what I understand from different image processing tutorials, this cube must consists of voxels (3D pixels). I want to give every voxel an initial color value, say gray.
Third, I want to access every voxel and change its color, but I want to distinguish the voxels that represent the faces of the cube from those that represent the internal region. I want to axis every voxel by its position x,y, z. At the end, we will end up with a cube that have different colors regions.
I've searched a lot but couldn't find a good way to implement that, but the code given here seems very close in regard to constructing the internal region of the cube,
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/3280-voxel
But it's not clear to me how it performs the process.
Can anyone tell me how to build such a cube in MATLAB?
Thanks.
You want to plot voxels! Good! Lets see how we can do this stuff.
First of all: yeah, the unit of 3D shapes may be voxels, but they don't need to be. You can plot an sphere in 3D without it being "blocky", thus you dont need to describe it in term of voxels, the same way you don't need to describe a sinusoidal wave in term of pixels to be able to plot it on screen. Look at the figure below. (same happens for cubes)
If you are interested in drawing voxels, I generally would recommend you to use vol3D v2 from Matlab's FEX. Why that instead of your own?
Because the best (only?) way of plotting voxels is actually plotting flat square surfaces, 6 for each cube (see answer here for function that does that). This flat surfaces will also create some artifacts for something called z-fighting in computer graphics. vol3D actually only plots 3 surfaces, the ones looking at you, saving half of the computational time, and avoiding ugly plotting artifacts. It is easy to use, you can define colors per voxel and also the alpha (transparency) of each of them, allowing you to see inside.
Example of use:
% numbers are arbitrary
cube=zeros(11,11,11);
cube(3:9,3:9,3:9)=5; % Create a cube inside the region
% Boring: faces of the cube are a different color.
cube(3:9,3:9,3)=2;
cube(3:9,3:9,9)=2;
cube(3:9,3,3:9)=2;
cube(3:9,9,3:9)=2;
cube(3,3:9,3:9)=2;
cube(9,3:9,3:9)=2;
vold3d('Cdata',cube,'alpha',cube/5)
But yeah, that still looks bad. Because if you want to see the inside, voxel plotting is not the best option. Alphas of different faces stack one on top of the other and the only way of solving this is writing advanced computer graphics ray tracing algorithms, and trust me, that's a long and tough road to take.
Very often one has 4D data, thus data that contains 3D location and a single data for each of the locations. One may think that in this case, you really want voxels, as each of them have a 3D +color, 4D data. Indeed! you can do it with voxels, but sometimes its better to describe it in some other ways. As an example, lets see this person who wanted to highlight a region in his/hers 4D space (link). To see a bigger list I suggest you look at my answer in here about 4D visualization techniques.
Lets try wits a different approach than the voxel one. Lets use the previous cube and create isosurfaces whenever the 4D data changes of value.
iso1=isosurface(cube,1);
iso2=isosurface(cube,4);
p1=patch(iso1,'facecolor','r','facealpha',0.3,'linestyle','none');
p2=patch(iso2,'facecolor','g','facealpha',1,'linestyle','none');
% below here is code for it to look "fancy"
isonormals(cube,p1)
view(3);
axis tight
axis equal
axis off
camlight
lighting gouraud
And this one looks way better, in my opinion.
Choose freely and good plotting!

Smooth circular data - Matlab

I am currently doing some image segmentation on a bone qCT picture, see for instance images below.
I am trying to find the different borders in the picture for instance the outer border separating the bone to the noisy background. In this analysis I am getting a list of points (vec(1,:) containing x values and vex(2,:) containing the y values) in random order.
To get them into order I am using using a block of code which effectively takes the first point vec(1,1),vec(1,2) and then finds the closest point among the rest of the points in the vector. And then repeats.
Now my problem is that I want to smooth the data but how do I do that as the points lie in a circular formation? (I do have the Curve Fitting Toolbox)
Not exactly a smoothing procedure, but a way to simplify your data would be to compute the boundary of the convex hull of the data.
K = convhull(O(1,:), O(2,:));
plot(O(1,K), O(2,K));
You could also consider using alpha shapes if you want more control.

Fast way to convert array of points into triangle strip?

I have an array of CGPoints (basic struct with two floats: x and y). I want to use OpenGL ES to draw a textured curve using these points. I can do this fine with just two points, but it gets harder when I need to make a line from several points.
Currently I draw a line horizontally, calculate its angle from the points given, and then rotate it. I don't think doing this for all lines in a curve is a good idea. There's probably a faster way.
I'm thinking that I can "enlarge" or "constrict" all the points at once to make a curve with some sort of width.
I'm not positive what you want to accomplish, but consider this:
Based on a ordered list of points, you can draw a polyline using those points. If you want to have a polyline with a 2D texture on it, you can draw a series of quadrilaterals (using two triangles each, of course). You can generate these quadrilaterals using an idea similar to catmul-rom spline generation.
Consider a series of points p[i-1], p[i], p[i+1]. Now, for each i, you can find two points each an epsilon distance away from p[i] along the line perpendicular to the line connecting p[i-1] and p[i+1]. You can determine the two points generated for the endpoints in various ways, like using the perpendicular to the line from p[0] to p[1].
I'm not sure if this will be faster than your method, but you should be caching the results. If you are planning on doing this every frame, another type of solution to your problem may be needed.