User manual

40
Octree & Degree
When you’re saving or exporting your scan as a meshed object (i.e. as an OBJ
or STL file), you are prompted to enter in your desired “Octree” and “Degree”
settings. These are fairly complex subjects, but after experimenting you will get
a feel for how these two settings affect the final meshed object.
Octree Depth: Octrees help the computer organize the points of a 3D object
very efficiently. An oversimplified way of explaining it is to imagine slicing up
your point cloud into eight equal cubes (octants). That is the equivalent to an
Octree depth of 1.
To get to a depth of 2, slice up each octant into eight more octants (totaling 64
octants). Slice/divide those 64, and you get 512 octants. At an Octree depth of 9
(8
9
) you will have 134,217,728 individual octants (i.e., 134,217,728 individual
little cubes grouping your points together).
The higher the number the Octree Depth parameter is set, the more importance
is put on each point. This will also mean exponentially longer mesh times. The
lower the Octree Depth number, the less importance each individual point has.
Octree 0 (1 cube)
Octree 1 (8 cubes)
Octree 2 (64 cubes)