# Generating 3d body mesh from pointcloud
**URL:** https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [March 20, 2019, 7:38pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545 "2019-03-20T19:38:01Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@thully](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/thully)
#### Post date: [March 20, 2019, 7:38pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/1 "2019-03-20T19:38:01Z")
I have several pointcloud files consisting of x, y, and z points associated with a human body. What I’d like to do is generate a 3d mesh of this body from the pointcloud. Is this possible, and if so what filters should I use? I tried using SurfaceReconstructionFilter, ContourFilter, and ReverseSense together (as in the SurfaceFromUnorganizedPoints example) but the result looks very blocky.
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### Author:  [@marcomusy](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/marcomusy)
#### Post date: [March 20, 2019, 7:57pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/2 "2019-03-20T19:57:28Z")
Check out this example on how to reconstruct a surface from points: [recosuface.py](https://github.com/marcomusy/vtkplotter/blob/master/examples/advanced/recosurface.py)
In the example:
1. An object is loaded and noise is added to its vertices.
2. the point cloud is smoothened with MLS (see [moving\_least\_squares.py](https://github.com/marcomusy/vtkplotter/blob/master/examples/advanced/moving_least_squares2D.py))
3. `clean()` imposes a minimum distance among mesh points where `tol` is a fraction of the cloud size.
4. a triangular mesh is extracted from this set of sparse points, `bins` is the number of voxels of the subdivision
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### Author:  [@lorensen](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/lorensen)
#### Post date: [March 20, 2019, 8:09pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/3 "2019-03-20T20:09:39Z")
The [VTKExamples Project](https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/) has three algorithms to generate meshes from point clouds:
[https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/ExtractSurface/](https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/ExtractSurface/)
[https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/PoissonExtractSurface/](https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/PoissonExtractSurface/)
[https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/PowercrustExtractSurface/](https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/PowercrustExtractSurface/)
and this one compares the three techniques:
[https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/CompareExtractSurface/](https://lorensen.github.io/VTKExamples/site/Cxx/Points/CompareExtractSurface/)
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### Author:  [@lorensen](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/lorensen)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2019, 5:10am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/4 "2019-03-21T05:10:21Z")
Can you share the original point cloud?
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### Author:  [@thully](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/thully)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2019, 3:07pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/5 "2019-03-21T15:07:24Z")
I’m not using vtkplotter - I’m using the standard VTK python bindings. I’m not sure how vtkplotter works, but I need to embed this in an application so I’m not sure it’s suitable…
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### Author:  [@thully](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/thully)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2019, 4:16pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/6 "2019-03-21T16:16:57Z")
Those use VTK Remote Modules, and I’m using pip to install VTK for use with a Python project. Do I need to build VTK manually to make use of those modules? That wouldn’t be ideal, as this tool is intended to be used by other users.
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### Author:  [@marcomusy](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/marcomusy)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2019, 4:24pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/7 "2019-03-21T16:24:09Z")
if you want to avoid dependencies from `vtkplotter` in your application you can grab the python code from [here](https://github.com/marcomusy/vtkplotter/blob/85e2e2ba9a6e40d001ac4145c2787aab8b246fe1/vtkplotter/analysis.py#L1212).
This is based on the vtkExtractSurface class mentioned in the VTKExamples Project.
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### Author:  [@lorensen](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/lorensen)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2019, 4:41pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/8 "2019-03-21T16:41:21Z")
One of the generators is in vtk proper.
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### Author:  [@michaelhogg](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/michaelhogg)
#### Post date: [June 28, 2019, 7:50am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/generating-3d-body-mesh-from-pointcloud/545/9 "2019-06-28T07:50:39Z")
Hi,
Can you tell me if vtkPoissonReconstruction or vtkPowerCrustSurfaceReconstruction exist in the python 3 version of vtk? I get a message saying that they don’t exist in my vtk version (8.1.2 for Python 3.6 and Python 3.7). vtkSurfaceReconstructionFilter and vtkExtractSurface are there.
Cheers,
Michael