Getting Started with PointKit: Scan¶

Basic Workflow¶

PointKit: Scan (PKS) has a lot of different features that can be used in a lot of different ways. In this post we'll be guiding you through a simple workflow that should help you get familiar with some of the more commonly used features.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll know how to navigate the main toolbar in order to:

• import meshes into PKS,
• select meshes,
• align your selected meshes,
• finalize your aligned selection of meshes,
• delete unnecessary files,
• use the selection tool to tidy up your data, and
• save the resutls to a new file.

The Main Toolbar¶

The PKS Toolbar is designed to facilitate a quick and easy workflow with some of PKS' most commonly used tools. The toolbar, pictured below, allows users to easily import, save, align, and finalize mesh data.

You'll note two additional icons - one for sharing data to PointKit: View, and one for connecting scanners - that are outside the scope of this demo.

Importing Meshes into PKS¶

There are several ways to load data into PKS. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll focus on the Import button:

Clicking the Import Button will open a file explorer window that will allow you to navigate your system:

Once our scans have been loaded into PKS, two things will happen:

1. First, we'll see our mesh data begin to populate the entity list on the left-hand side of PKS. From here, it is possible to select one or more meshes, set their visibility, update their names, and more.
2. Second, we'll see our mesh data render in PKS. Similarly to the entity list, we can interact with the rendered data to select, re-orient, and otherwise interact with one or more of our meshes.

From here, the world is our oyster. We can manipulate, process, and analyze our imported data to our heart's content. Next, we'll get a small taste of what PKS can do by selecting and aligning our newly-imported data.

Aligning Mesh Data¶

Selecting Meshes¶

In order to perform a processing or analysis task on our data, we need to be able to select which meshes we want to interact with. This can be done in a number of ways, with the two main ones being:

1. Clicking on a single rendered mesh in the main UI, and
2. Clicking the name of the mesh we want to select in the left-hand list of loaded data.

These two main techniques can be easily extended upon with keyboard shortcuts:

1. If you wish to select multiple meshes at once, you can hold ctrl down while click on the meshes you wish to select.
2. If you wish to select a portion of meshes between two entries in the left-hand list:
   1. click on the first mesh you wish to select
   2. hold down shift
   3. click on the mesh at the end of the range of meshes you wish to select - all meshes between these two (inclusive) will be selected

Alternatively, if you wish to select all meshes in your current project regardless of their visibility you can press a on your keyboard.

Aligning Selected Meshes¶

The Alignment tool allows us to align 2 or more selected meshes with each other (provided there is sufficient overlapping data between the selected meshes, of course).

I've gone ahead and selected every mesh loaded into my project by pressing a on my keyboard. As a result, my current project looks like this:

A few things to note before proceeding with our first alignment attempt:

1. The 'eye' icon present for each mesh in our main list is not greyed-out. This means the mesh is visible to us, and will be included in the alignment attempt. If the 'eye' icon was greyed out the mesh would not be visible, and it would not be included in the alignment attempt regardless of whether we selected it or not.
2. The 'lock' icon present for each mesh in our main list is in the 'unlocked' position. This means that PKS will automatically move the mesh as-needed during the alignment attempt, locking it once it has been aligned to its companion meshes. Meshes that are 'locked' prior to an alignment attempt will not be moved, and will impact the alignment results. Whether or not this is desired behaviour will depend on your specific use-case.

With that out of the way, we're ready to align our data! There are many ways to align data in PKS, but for now let's keep it simple by using the Align button in the main Toolbar:

When you click the button, PKS will automatically begin an alignment attempt and you will be able to watch your data align in real-time. Provided that your data has sufficient overlap, the end result will be that your meshes are aligned to eachother:

Aligned and Locked Meshes

As you can see, the alignment tool was able to automatically align our meshes to each other and lock them in their aligned position. Next, we will use the Finalization tool to generate a single, combined mesh out of our aligned ones.

Finalizing Meshes¶

The Finalization tool will turn our individual, but newly aligned, scans into a single mesh with some additional post-processing steps. To use it, all we need to do is click the Finalize button in the main toolbar while having our desired meshes selected.

Clicking the Finalize button will open a settings menu that will allow you to select your desired settings in relation to the post-processing that you can experiment with to find the best results for your data. For our purposes we will be using the default settings. All you need to do is click the "Finalize" button on the menu:

The Finalize process will begin automatically, processing your selected data into a single, combined mesh:

There are a few things worth noting about this image:

1. The Finalization tool automatically sets the visibility of the selected data to be invisible. The only visible, rendered data on our screen at the end of this process will be the Finalized mesh.
2. The Finalization tool will generate our finalized mesh and name it after the first selected scan while appending _F to this name. This is an easy way of finding your finalized mesh if you have a lot of data loaded into PKS.

We can now select and delete our old data to clean up our project a little. You can use whatever selection approach you are most comfortable with. In this type of situation, we find it easiest to press a to select all data, then ctrl+click the finalized mesh to de-select it. Once the only selected data is the data we want to delete, we can:

1. Press the delete key to remove the data from our project,
2. Right-click on the main UI and click Delete Selection from the submenu, or
3. Right-click on the main list and select Delete -> Delete Selected from the submenu.

PKS will prompt you to confirm your deletion, to which you can either select Yes or No. We want to clean up our project, so we click Yes. Our project now looks like this:

Tidy Up and Save¶

Now that we have a finalized mesh that we can work with, let's see how we can remove some mesh data and save our work to a new file.

Selecting (Parts of) a Mesh¶

At this stage, you may have already tried re-orienting the mesh that is rendering in the main PKS window. It's as easy as clicking the selected mesh and moving your mouse to shift the mesh's position. But what if we want to delete parts of a mesh? For instance, maybe our original scans included undesirable parts of the environment surrounding our target object?

To easily remove such data, we can use the Lasso Tool. To use the Lasso Tool, hold down the space bar while moving your mouse over the area of the mesh you wish to select. You should see the lasso (A thin, blue line) begin to form following the path of your mouse. When you have enclosed the desired portion of your mesh with the lasso, release the space key. You should see the selected portion of your mesh highlighted in green:

Deleting a selection¶

Once you have selected the desire portion of your mesh, you can either:

1. Press the delete key, or
2. Right-click and select the delete selection option from the submenu.

The selected portion of your mesh will be permanently deleted:

Saving a Mesh¶

Ok, so now we've:

• imported scan data
• aligned it
• finalized it
• deleted unneeded data
• selected and deleted parts of our mesh

We should now save the fruits of our labour to a new file. In the Main PKS Toolbar, click the Save button:

Once clicked, the Save button will open a file explorer window (similar to the one used with the Import button). You can choose the desired location and name of your data, click Save, and you will have officially exported your processed scan data as a pbn file.

Conclusion¶

This concludes our tutorial on Getting Started with PointKit: Scan. Please be sure to review our other documentation for more information on regular usage of PointKit: Scan as well as tutorials on our more advanced features as well.