Can I edit .obj file in Meshlab or Blender? - graphics

I have .obj file of tree and I want to remove some portion of it. Is it possible to do so in Meshlab?

Yes, both of them support .obj files.
http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/Wavefront_OBJ

No they will not open in Blender! I have a few I'd love to edit, & downloaded blender since it was free, & they will not open in it, no mater what!

I understand that you can manually edit .OBJ meshes by selecting edges or faces in Edit Mode, but is there an easier way to do it?
(ie, the Decimate Modifier does not work. It can take a lot of time reducing polygons on a high poly mesh manually...)

Related

Meshlab: .stl file does not retain smoothing after saving

I have been trying Meshlab software for smoothing the .stl file and exporting the mesh as .wrl file. I used Laplacian smoothing (Laplacian Smooth with smoothing steps of 2, 1D boundary smooting and contangent weighting). After applying the smoothing filter, it worked nicely. Then I exported the file and saved it. However, when I open the saved file afterwards it goes back to the original un-smoothed version, each time. Same problem persists even if I export the mesh as .stl file. I am not sure if this is a bug or something else.
I don't know if I have missed anything. Do you have any idea what might the problem be?
Thanks in advance.

make swf from fla without ever opening it

is it possible to change text and images in a fla file without ever opening it up and then making the swf via command line? I want to make a flash template and save the fla. Then be able to update my text and image name and convert it to swf. I have one template but tons of different text options and background images. It would be nice to be able to copy the master.fla twenty times and just change the source code (will do this from command line) and then convert to swf (via command line).
Any help would be appreciated.
With CS5, you can do half of what you're asking today, by using the XFL file format instead of FLA. Instead of a binary blob, you get an editable XML file and a tree of separate asset files: PNGs, AS3 files, etc. You can then modify the XML or AS3 files programmatically to get your variants.
(A CS5 FLA file is really just a zipped up version of the XFL, but there's no advantage to using that instead of an XFL. In CS4 and previous, FLA was a proprietary binary format.)
The missing piece is an XFL compiler. Adobe currently provides no such thing, and the third party market hasn't yet produced one.
You could use a systems automation tool to drive the Flash Professional environment through the compilation steps. On OS X, for example, either Automator or AppleScript should be able to do what you want. It'll just have more overhead than the command line compiler you were hoping for.
I agree with Jason, there are a lot of alternatives to what you suggest. Keeping content out of the SWF is good practice actually. This is a good way to avoid large files!
Depending on what you 're looking to achieve, there are a lot of solutions available. XML is an option, JSON another.
If you're looking to build a template, any of the above would seem appropriate.
It sounds like you're working from the Flash IDE, as Jason suggests you may want to have a look at another IDE, such as FlashDevelop, FDT or FlashBuilder as they make coding with AS3 a lot easier.

beamer includegraphics with screenshots

I'm using the LaTeX-Beamer class for making presentations. Every once in a while I need to include screenshots. Those graphics are pixel-based, of course. I use includegraphics like this:
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width= \paperwidth]{img/analyzer.png}
\end{figure}
or usually something like this:
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width= 0.8\linewidth]{img/analyzer.png}
\end{figure}
This leads to pretty bad readibility of the contained text, so I'm asking for your best practices: How would you include screenshots containing text considering, that I will do the output PDF with pdflatex?
EDIT: I suppose I'm looking for something like an 1:1 presetation of the image within beamer. However, [scale = 1.0] doesn't achieve what I'm looking for.
Your best bet is to scale the image outside of Latex for inclusion, and include it in 1:1 ratio. The scaling done by graphics packages in Latex isn't going to be anywhere near as good as possible from other tools. Latex (Tex) has limited floating-point arithmetic capabilities, whereas an external tool can use sophisticated algorithms to get the scaling better.
Another option is to use only a part of the screenshot, the one you want to concentrate on.
Edit: If you can change the font size before taking the screenshot, that's another option—just increase the font size for the screenshots.
Of course, you can combine the two methods.
I have done exactly what you do and e.g defined
\newcommand{\screenshot}[1]{\centerline{%
\includegraphics[height=7.8cm,transparent]{#1}}} % 7.8in
which worked with whatever style I was using at the time. The files included with this macro were all PNGs created with one the usual Linux screen capture tools.
Edit: You may have to play with the size (height and width) of your input files. It came out rather nice for me (and this was from a presentation in 2006).
How about scaling it as follows:
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{images/myimage.jpg}
This works for me.
Have you tried to convert the image to .eps or .pdf file and use this file in LaTeX?
Maybe try also latex, dvips and ps2pdf.
Problem might be in used viewer, in Linux I use Document viewer or ePDFViewer and output is much worse than in Adobe Reader or Acrobat, which I use in Windows...

Tools for displaying text, powerpoint style, in linux

I have a problem where I need a way to display a repeating series of "images" on a computer monitor. Specifically, given a series of text files, I'd like a way to display the contents of said files on a screen in a way much like a powerpoint would.
My current thoughts are to find some tool that will take in a text file of some format, and then output an image which contains the text from the file. Then I'd put it in a directory and have some Slideshow program continuously go between the images in that directory. It's a very hacky solution, obviously.
So, does anyone know of tools that would do such a thing? Or is there a better way to do this? I've looked into the library libgd2, but it doesn't seem to support text-wrapping for images, which is something I'd need.
Thanks!
MagicPoint is a tool for displaying presentations. Presentations are written in a simple plain text file format, much like HTML.
You could easily generate the MagicPoint file automatically and then run it and display the presentation. You can also generate HTML, PS oder PDF from the presentation and display that.
Are you looking for powerpoint equivalent for linux? Openoffice??
have you tried some magic scripting with TeX?
a chain like
tex file | dvi2ps | ps2jpg > output
and define some TeX-Macros?
Showoff's pretty cool. It uses Markdown-formatted slides to create a simple little Sinatra app that you run (with showoff serve), and then view in a browser.
Docutils. See http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/slide-shows.html
The text syntax is reStructuredText
another idea:
text2gif
To complement the suggestions given by others, if you were going to write a program to do this, it would probably be more efficient to just render the text to the screen directly, rather than converting it to images first. It could probably be done using a canvas or text box component in a full-screen window on whatever window manager you are using (e.g. KDE or Gnome).
I give presentations with Opera's #media projection CSS support. On http://talks.webconverger.com/ you can find a template and an example which you can load in Opera's full screen mode and start sliding through.
So besides writing in a familiar language HTML, it's dead easy to share the slides and even get your audience to look at the slides as you're going through them.
If you are looking for something more flashy, there are tools on the Web to generate animations and what not, and again you would simply use a full screen browser to play it back to your audience.

How can you tell png8 from a png24

I'm working on a website that uses lots of png24 files, for transparency.
I need to replace them with png8 files, as all the png fix style javascript workarounds for png24 cause IE6 to lock up randomly.
See this link to get an idea of the symptoms IE6 displays - http://blogs.cozi.com/tech/2008/03/transparent-pngs-can-deadlock-ie6.html
Does anybody know an easy way of targeting existing png24 files, to replace them with the png8s?
I'm using a OS X, and file browsers like Adobe bridge don't show this, nor can I find the info on the commandline, or the finder.
Help!
The file utility on OSX can tell you the colour depth in a PNG file, e.g:
% file foo.png
foo.png: PNG image data, 1514 x 1514, 8-bit grayscale, non-interlaced
You actually CAN get alpha transparency in PNG-8's but it's super complicated.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/09/18/png8-the-clear-winner/
http://www.personal.psu.edu/drs18/blogs/davidstong/2007/09/png8_alpha_transparency_from_f.html
It basically creates GIF like substance for IE6 and a real PNG with alpha transparency for better browsers. It's a more pleasant degradation path. Right now, I think you need Fireworks, but I am exploring other options.
To add to Alnitak’s answer, once you find all PNG24 you want to convert, you can batch them all with pngquant:
pngquant -v -f --ext .png 256 *.png
This converts all PNG files to PNG8 in place, overwriting them.
I think you might be asking the wrong question. PNG8s don't have the true-alpha you've been working hard to fix in IE6. If you replace the PNG24s with PNG8s you are no better off than replacing them with GIFs.
Maybe you could test an alternative replacement/fix script - there are some shockingly bad ones out there, maybe that's where the problem is?
Here's (and I say this tongue in cheek!) the right question.
JoeBloggs is right, you're asking the wrong question.
I've never had IE6 break with a good pngfix script. You've either got a bad pngfix script, or a bad IE6 install.
PNG8 will ruin your nice transparencies and make it look like you're using GIFs.
pngcheck, a command line tool, can dump the information you need. http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/apps/pngcheck.html
pngcheck.exe a.png
OK: a.png (1024x1024, 32-bit RGB+alpha, non-interlaced, 80.7%).
pngcheck.exe b.png
OK: b.png (1024x1024, 8-bit palette+trns, non-interlaced, 83.1%).
Perhaps imagemagick helps you out at converting png24 files to png8 files.

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