Lets do this! New Year New Month, go Broncos!

Wow, January flew by rightt??? That's ok, well as long as your not ok with that...

Why do say that, well because, each day is a gift, and we shouldn't let that gift fly by. For example, Super Bowl 50!, is this Sunday, for almost 2 weeks, since the Broncos played the Pats, I've been looking forward to this game, and wishing it was SuperBowl time already. Well, several times throughout the pass two weeks, I have cuaght myself and said hey, Thank God, today is Monday, Wednesday...FRIDAY!!!, etc.. Otherwise it would be a serious mistake to only LIVE once or twice a week?!(Fridays and\or Sunday?)

So today, make some goals, aim high, and joy all your blessings.

Speaking of starting a goal, this past several weeks, with the exception of the Super Bowl, getting back in shape, etc... I've been really interested in getting a personal project going. So the plan is to blog on updates on that project, which will be a form of documentation of the process, and common gotchas and don't dos that were no so common at first, second, or maybe even third glance.


Alright, after that tease?, the project itself will revolve around using the Microsoft Kinect Sensor, to grab 3d data of an object(s), given that data, format, decorate, and message it to a nice view able format. The end result is to take this new 3d object(with color), and place it in a 3d program for visual learning!!!(*Yeah I know its vague, but more on the main project at a later time).

My Kinect is a v2 sensor, with the adapter for my windows 10 laptop.

The first place to check out would be: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188670.aspx, to get a general overview of the fusion sdk, which currently does quite a bit, and has some nice examples of useage.

Next, when it comes to installing the kinect, I had driver issues, and I must warn you, that the kinect from what I can tell is picky on the hardware specs it will work with(saying that losely...) so do research and verify your computer hardware is compatible.

To actually, resolve my driver issues, I found this website:
http://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-kinect-windows-10, follow the directions on grabbing the latest development drivers from microsoft; once I grabbed the drivers, I disabled the registry key which allowed me to get them; call me paranoid...

Then, I found it straight forward to create a 3d model with color of my boxer, using the Fusion SDK Example: Fusion Explorer D2D. Specifically, it's important that when using this example, be sure to save your 3d model as a *.ply object, as this is the only format that seemed*(I say that with a lot of ignorance at the moment) to store color data*.

Afterwards, I was able to import my 3d model into a program like meshlab to view it!!!
Finally, once you import your model, you will most likely notice, it's not perfect, and what water proof???

WHen I say that, I mean, if you tossed, your 3d boxer model in your pool, it will sink to the bottom taking in water... this reminds me of the  time, my lab pushed my newly purchased boxer puppy into my clean pool, which later involved me jumping in the pool and showing her how not to swim...(we both went to the bottom and bobbled up to the top, both Daisy and I are doing fine now). Anyway, to combat this hole* issue, we need to replace these holes, and or fill them in.

There are tools out there like netfabb which can do this and are free. My first attempts and filling in the holes of my 3d model, didnt go so well, I apparently had a lot of holes, and the netfabb app ran out of memory. I also used the repiar option on the meshlab tool, and it just crashed the program, I suspect it's becuase my 3d model maybe high res enough, and very holey.

Aside from freeware, I'd really like to fix this from a script, or another program, perhaps via an api to a dll. So far I haven't found a library to do this. But, I found a good early Saturday read, or Friday night eye puller, which appears promising: https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/holefill-3dpvt02/hole.pdf.

There is source available for this algorithm actually, but its compiled for linux. My goal is to compile it for windows 10 and go from there.

So, stay tuned, next post will involve issues and partial resolutions to compiling and getting glut working.

Go BRONCOS!






UPDATE: If you need to build glut for windows 10, grab the windows 7 sdk, and build from visual studio command line, you may have to add the windows 7 sdk include to the bat file:
set INCLUDE=%INCLUDE%;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\include;