How are you using the meshes you create?

I haven't found any usefulness in creating a mesh, otherthan visual or 3d printing. The problem with mesh is you need a complete point cloud, else you have holes and warping. Also it takes a lot of disk space to carry point cloud and mesh.

Tell us how you are utilizing them.

Yea visualization is the obvious one. And 3D printing technology hasn't quite kept up with digital visualization, I did think in the past it was going to be much more useful than it is. I use to print out 3D topos and secure 30cm x 30cm tiles together to make large DEMs. I have a 6' x 4' print of the valley I live in on my wall.

Yea a good point cloud or create it from depth maps. Its not too difficult to create a nice mesh. This is one I made a few weeks ago Im playing with, it hasnt been cleaned at all. Straight out of Metashape.

Im still trying to figure that out. In the past I've done drone aerial video and tracked 3D models/meshes onto the video to visualize a project on a bare construction site. The clients really enjoyed that. Im playing with the idea of creating a mesh of a area, say Disney land for example, turning it into a video game that can be played on VR, IOS, Android ect where the players would virtually interact with the area so the public could visit the business before hand to get a feel of it. Picture google earth but high quality and gamified. Kids could do scavenger hunts of Disney Land on the drive there to get a virtual feel of the park layout.

I struggled so much with getting 3D pdfs to work that I stopped experimenting with meshes (I liked the idea of having an entertaining deliverable for the client, but the default 3D PDFs that pop out of Pix4D are not acceptable in most circumstances).

From where I left it, Meshlab was awesome at generating the files that either Adobe or Bluebeam could theoretically make 3D PDFs with, but both Adobe and Bluebeam were not creating very good 3D PDFs (either having poor user interface or poor file handling, i.e. file sizes got too large too quickly)… I might want to try again using Firefox’s PDF handler

One of my lurking aspirations is/was to learn to use Blender in a rigorous way.. I think that’s partly due to having a similar sense about how helpful/fun it would be to create a virtual environment from certain [usually topo-style] surveys.. basically like Autodesk’s Revit(?) software, but with the genius of the Blender community, rather than the idiocy of the Autodesk community.

 using meshes for volume, and 3D printing.   A fun journey for me has been scanning with a Trimble TX8, and from there segmenting on a 3 point plane 1/2 of a FAT BEAR mesh of brown bears in Katmai National park and generating an estimated volume in cubic feet, doubling the value and using a 60/40 percent breakdown of water/fat to SWAG a guess on weight of the bear.  Here is Walker, a contender staring down from the top of Brooks falls.  Were heading to the San Diego zoo next week to scan weighed polar bears so biologists can come up with an algorithm to go from volume to weight. https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/scanning-bears-who-is-the-fattest-of-em-all/  

@gisjoel That's really cool !

What a novel use for the gear.

I'm surprised they stay still long enough to be measured.

I made up a short video of how I get a decent mesh and some possible use cases...

@jimcox With the TX8 and a tight window of scan span, were still relying on luck to have the bear stand still long enough.   Here is a photo from our visit to the San Diego zoo last week where we continued our study with 3 polar bears. 

Mesh and eventually volume is totally dependent on a good stance and minimal movement.  Kalluk, a large male bear was a good "bear" and it helps that the handlers have some food laid out ahead of time.