3DF Zephyr Textured Mesh Issue

 3DF Zephyr works in 5 major stages. Camera inputs, sparse point cloud generation, dense point cloud generation, mesh generation and textured mesh generation. Aside from the speed for generation, any background captured by the cameras has no detriment on the final product until generating the textured mesh.

Every part before the textured mesh relies on a live recalibration of the texture when parts of the model are removed. This texture is only ever temporary and can be changed by altering the model. When the textured mesh is created, a set texture is also made and is no longer altered by changing the mesh. Like the texture below, if a textured mesh is created and the background removed after, all the necessary textures remain despite them no longer being useful. This mean that it limits the texture space allowed for the important part of the scan.

Unfortunately, this issue was not obvious to me until I brought the asset into UE4. Zephyr's texturing system is excellent at controlling texture bleeding so the artefacts did not appear on the initial model.

These artefacts were caused by the bleeding UVs of Zephyr's textured mesh. Due to the messy nature of the scan's UVs, it is bleeding colours from the background onto the model itself because the texture was created before removing the geometry from the scan. I had also made this mistake on the mosasaur tooth but got lucky that none of these colour bled onto it. Unfortunately, this meant I was not made aware of this workflow problem sooner, but once I had fixed the issue, it not only removed the artefacts but actually improved the quality of the texture.

This mistake has taught me to always trim unnecessary topology before solidifying the texture by generating a textured mesh. Such a small change in workflow made a massive difference to the quality of the asset and it's texture.