In Meshlab - when finding surface area of a trimmed model - Am I getting just the outer surface of the model or the inner as well?
I have made 3D models of small coral skeletons (size of toy army men) that are placed on a hard surface and then scanned. This leaves a hole in the bottom of the model - which I close. I want to find the surface area of just the coral part - but not the very bottom surface.
My current workflow is to open my .obj in Meshlab, scale my model, then clean-up the model and remove things I don't want, then close the hole on the bottom, then go to Filters>Quality Measure and Computation>Compute Geometric Measures to compute the surface area of the total model including the bottom.
I then remove/delete all of the coral and just leave the bottom surface (which has a top now) and run Filters>Quality Measure and Computation>Compute Geometric Measures again to get just the surface area of the bottom (?) - my Question is: since the model now has two surfaces - Is Meshlab giving me just the bottom surface area or including the newly fashioned top surface as well?
Not sure why you say the surface has a top. They should be triangles that are rendered by two sides, but it is a single surface. So the response is that meshlab is giving just the area of the bottom surface.
Despite that, I will propose you one alternative method which seems easier.
Just after closing the hole on the bottom (with the Close Holes filter) you should see that the new triangles are selected. Invoke the filter Compute Area/Perimeter of selection (located in Filters->Quality measure and Computations) and you will see the area of the selection, which is your desired value.
