Reconstructing a Mesh from a Point Cloud

I posted a video describing one way to reconstruct a mesh from a point cloud in Meshlab, based on some info at the Meshlab blog.

Poisson Reconstruction in Meshlab from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

And I got a bunch of great tips from Sophie Barret-Kahn: here's an academic paper reporting on the different software that's available.

Rhino has a lot of tools for meshing, re-meshing, and surfacing (making parametrized functions that describe the mesh). Here's one for working with a point cloud:

There's more info on the Rhino tools here.

If you're more of a nerd, Matlab has some good low-level tools for handling this kind of data.

Finally, Blender has its own tools for dealing with mesh reconstruction. Taylor Goodman, who developed a structured light scanner for Makerbot, has a tutorial describing how to reconstruct a mesh for 3d printing from a point cloud:

I think there is a script for this on blenderartists but the site is broken at the moment.