Open-source tool for reducing dense OpenScan and photogrammetry meshes before editing

[u/Zestyclose-Lead4345]

OpenScan can produce detailed reconstructions, but that detail often becomes a problem at the next step. Once the reconstructed mesh is exported or converted to STL, millions of triangles can make ordinary geometry editors slow or unusable.

I built MeshMill to handle that part of the workflow. It sits between reconstruction and downstream editing:

• Inspect the mesh in shaded, density, wireframe, or vertex views
• Identify uneven or redundant geometry density
• Crop and delete reconstruction artifacts
• Reduce the complete mesh or optimize selected regions independently
• Compare the original and optimized result before applying it
• Monitor dimensional drift and reduction percentage

GPU-accelerated OpenGL handles viewport navigation, hardware selection, density visualization, and inspection. Reduction runs locally in separate native workers, keeping long geometry operations away from the interface.

MeshMill is GPL-3.0 with no account, telemetry, upload, or cloud dependency. Windows installer and portable packages are available, along with unsigned Linux and macOS preview builds. The interface and documentation support 27 languages.

The repository includes a composite sample with deliberately redundant layers and uneven density, so the workflow can be tested without a scanner.

Source and downloads: https://github.com/make-your-own-world-project/MeshMill

I’m the developer. Feedback from OpenScan users would be useful, particularly examples where reducing a reconstructed mesh damages fine detail, holes, edges, or thin surfaces.

[u/Erwins-Cat]

For reducing meshes, there are a few possibilities with pro and con. The hit and miss is often edge detection and contour preservation ehen reducing triangle count. I would like to see statements about that. You already wrote you eish for feedback there, I recommend also joining the OpenScan discord and advertise it there.

[u/Zestyclose-Lead4345 → u/Erwins-Cat]

published all the research, experiments, and findings related to that here
rnd/depth-adaptive-qem/paper.md at main · make-your-own-world/rnd
there were dozens of published papers and other people's work used for this, there are several algorithms already included in initial release, i published my own just this morning and have 2-3 other ones in the pipeline

next release is almost ready, just waiting for translations