Tim Ayres

Meshlab is not the right tool for this, as it does not have true boolean operators (it's boolean filters essentially re-sample the entire mesh using a marching cubes algorithm, which is almost certainly not what you want). I would suggest you try Blender instead, search for the boolean modifier.

I am the author of MLX (https://github.com/3DLIRIOUS/MeshLabXML), a Python interface to MeshLabServer. I have a great deal of experience working with MeshLabServer, creating complex MeshLab Server scripts using Python, and may be able to help with your project.

MeshLab isn't really the best tool for this. It does have a measuring tool (the yellow tape measure icon) but it is pretty rudimentary. Although, if you use Compute Planar Section to generate cross sections and then measure those, you may have better luck. MeshMixer has a useful Measure tool under Analysis; it has multiple options to perform differrent types of measurements, and is pretty easy to use IMO.

Hi Gilad, The MeshLabXML API has changed somewhat after the new MeshLab release in 2016.12; it is now object-based. The reason the old script no longer works is that the "Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation (with texture)" filte'rs name was changed in 2016.12 to "Simplification: Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation (with texture)". I just pushed a new version to PIP which you may want to try. Below is a conversion of the simplification script above to the new API, I hope you agree that this is an improvement....

What MeshLab version are you using and what is your meshlabserver command? I would guess that you are outputting the wrong layer; you may be outputting the first layer (the original file) instead of the second. Try adding a delete layer filter at the end of your script.

That's quite interesting. It's difficult to see the traingulation in the first mesh, can you please turn diplay edges and/or wireframe on? It would also be helpful to see what the original mesh looks like, or even better, provide a sample mesh that exhibits the issue.

In the compute.py module, see the functions parse_geometry & parse_topology.

I will try to squeeze it in if I can, but honestly I'm completely swamped at the moment. If you know Python (and you must, in order to use MLX) then you could write a parsing function yourself. That's the beauty of open source, right? If it helps, you can look at how I currently parse the geometry and topology info in compute.py.