How Memento Captures Reality into Mesh

At the inaugural REAL2015 conference, Autodesk announced the Beta release of Memento, a program able to create high quality meshes from reality data. Users can fix meshes and optimize them for use in digital workflows, subtractive manufacturing, additive manufacturing and 3D interactive media.

“We wanted to make sure reality computing was no longer an engineering or ‘geek only’ tool,” explained Tatjana Dzambazova, Sr. Product Manager at Autodesk. “Memento is an end-to-end solution for converting any captured reality input (photos or scans) into high definition 3D meshes that can be cleaned up, fixed and optimized for digital workflows. And while creating top quality results, it does not require any CAD or 3D modeling expertise”

Memento is an all in one application based on simplified workflows capable of creating 3D meshes from reality inputs, such as photogrammetry, handheld scanners, and in the next release laser scanners. Users upload their pictures and scans into the Memento cloud and they receive an email when the model is ready to work with, often within a few hours.

Some REAL2015 attendees were unhappy to see that the current release is only available on Windows. “I do not use Windows machines so it really kills me. So the latest thing in about a month and a half we will have a Mac version as well,” Dzambazova explained.

Other attendees, however, were very excited about the Beta release. For instance, Application Engineer Christoph Heid said, “Memento looks promising, I can’t wait to play with it.”

Memento’s Mesh Optimization Tools

The release is coupled with learning material, use cases and a 3D sharable gallery. Some of the tools included in Memento to help users fix their mesh include:

• Sculpting/ Smoothing
• Re-topologize
• Selection tools (marquee, lasso, brush, face, inversion, isolation, smart selection)
• Automatic mesh error detection
• Fix tools (holes, spikes, tunnels, particles, 3DPrint specific fixes)
• Optimize and export (baking texture maps, various mesh outputs, FBX with camera, video formats, image formats – and publish to 3D online gallery coming in two weeks

Additionally, users need no CAD experience. In fact, the program bypasses the need for a CAD tool in many instances. “Usually in CAD you define an object mathematically. It isn’t a real thing,” said Brian Matthews, VP at Autodesk.

Dzambazova explains that these tools allow users to “swim, snorkel, or dive” into the program. If the user has little knowledge of reality capture, they can leave the program to do most of the work. However, engineers and other experienced users will have the control they want to dive into the program and optimize the mesh for their uses.

Eythor Bender, Memento Beta user and CEO of personalized-prosthetics company UNYQ said, “I think Memento has a lot of potential. Autodesk is really on the forefront of this. The program is absolutely essential to our workflow to create customized fairings for prosthetics. Memento has all the tools you would ask for on a professional version but tailored for designers.”

Scalability of Memento’s Reality Capture Meshing Technology

Dzambazova used a museum as an example of Memento’s scalability, capturing their artifacts into a 3D environment. “This is not easy to do. It’s hard to scale, they have 150 million objects, 5 million MB of data, they have to buy 5-6 different software packages, hire experts to use them, and the tools aren’t made for the huge meshes created by reality data. This all brought us to the opportunity of Memento,” said Dzambazova. Adding that for this technology, “nothing is new, aside from the amazing core mesh streaming engine we built to handle big meshes, it is just bloody easy, scale-able and one program does it all.”

She isn’t kidding, either. Memento significantly simplifies the workflow of reality capture, and it can do it while making a model with over 2 billion polygons!

Since most downstream software or applications used for further workflows will be unable to handle 2 billion polygons, however, Dzambazova joked that “the program is able to export the 3D mesh while decimating the mesh into a more manageable size. It also bakes the texture maps without the mesh looking like origami. In fact, it looks as beautiful as the original full size mesh.” Some supported file types include .fbx (with camera export) , .obj (with/without QUADS), .rcp, .ply, .stl, .png, and .avi.

Engineering Uses of Memento

Design engineers will enjoy the program’s ability to capture real life as a start, addition or inspiration for their next designs. To that end, the captured mesh can be exported into Autodesk Fusion, Maya, Alias, and other Autodesk tools, where the design can be updated or prepped for assessments like FEA and CFD simulations.

Matthews explained, “The interesting thing is reality data is closer to what you use in simulation. To do an FEA analysis you will have the simulation engine turn the CAD object into a mesh of triangles … So instead of converting from a nurb-surface to a mesh you can theoretically start with the reality mesh. Unfortunately this detail of the mesh is often too complicated to get the simulation going. But as cloud is being used more often, I think down the road we will be able to get that simulation going as well.”

Dzambazova also explains that despite it’s capabilities, “Memento is in an early stage. The technology can be used in many workflows where it is appropriate. Perhaps the Autodesk simulation team will appropriate the meshing and decimation capabilities of Memento, but we have yet to learn how those workflows and meshes will perform with simulation at this time.”

Much to the chagrin of a few engineering REAL2015 attendees, however, the current service is only available through a cloud-connection, which could affect the program’s usability for engineers with government contracts and high IP securities.

“Currently, Memento points to the cloud to perform heavy computations like converting photos or scans into a mesh. There are two types of users, those that are happy everything is on the cloud to: reduce their need for computing power, access their work from anywhere, or let the cloud compute the image freeing the computer for shutdown or other work. And then there are those sensitive to putting their IP onto the cloud. We will see what we can do for those industries that wish to remain offline,” said Dzambazova.

Additionally, these same users were concerned that the current release is incapable of assessing laser scan point cloud data. However, Dzambazova promises that these concerns will be assessed in one of the next Beta releases in about 2-3 months: “We have that working … Users can import spherical images from  a registered point cloud from a product like ReCap and use that information to produce their mesh.”

What are your thoughts on Memento? Is it a toy used by artists, makers and scientists to bring their work to the digital masses? Or will it become a prominent engineering tool and help bring the real world into digital CAE software? Comment below.