Caveatron process 2.5 source code?

[Casey Anderson]

Hi, 

I've built a caveatron on behalf of the Timpanogos grotto, and we love it.  It's been a group effort, and I'm hoping to hand it of for general use now that it's working. 

However,

The point cloud rendering process is a little beyond many of the folks who would like to map caves with it, so I'm hoping to put together a piece of software that takes the caveatron output and builds up a usable output, with most of the steps resolved programmatically.  I'm having a hell of a time replicating how caveatron process translates the output files into a point cloud.txt.  If you would be willing to share hte caveatron process source code, I'll happily share back the interpereter that I'm working on, source code and all. 

Thanks,

Casey

[Rag Rastin]

Hello,

It would be a highly unusable piece of software.

When using Caveatron Process to combine LiDAR scans, there is always a need to adjust the settings depending on the specific scan traverse. Each part is different, and certain adjustments must be made at this stage. These include azimuth and velocity corrections as well as fixing laser errors, which are done by visually inspecting the traverse path and cannot be fully automated.

It is also recommended that this work be done by the same person who performed the scanning, because they were on site and remember the actual issues present in the object being scanned.

From my perspective, you simply need to learn using real, previously acquired scans. A lot of training is required to fully understand the process, and you will face many problems at the beginning.

[Emmanuel Robert]

Hello

We are preparing an expedition in Thailand to scan caves. We are considering building a cavetron but we would like to see the kind of output we could expect. Where can I find a 3D cave scan from a cavetron ?

Thank you

Best regards 

________________________________________________________________________________
Emmanuel ROBERT
tel : +33 6 50 81 55 21

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[Rag Rastin]

Hello,

You can find examples on Joe’s website:
https://caveatron.com/example_scans.html

I can also recommend my own website (although it is in Polish), which contains many scanned caves from the Jura region in Poland:
https://jaskinie3d.pl/spis-jaskin/
https://jaskinie3d.pl/wszystkie-plany/

Here are also some caves from Romania scanned using the Caveatron:
https://sketchfab.com/ragrastin

All of these were created with version C.

[Casey Anderson]

Hello Emmanuel,

Here is a link to one of the recent surveys that we have done with the Caveatron:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d4oDxrGYJy8HFrBRYjS0gVlA6B_wHI-e/view?usp=drive_link

I've also Included a flythrough: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18ZBZGy0ndBcc5Orq1Nv_gTuJh8tGnu6g/view?usp=drive_link

Enjoy your expedition!

[caveatron-discuss]

The source code for Caveatron Process is quite complicated with many parts. It would be very challenging to share it in any useful way and, as the poster above noted, sometimes requires manual intervention with each scan to get the best results. 

I suggest becoming familiar with that software and using it to get the point clouds for each scan. After you have the point cloud files, you can easily use a wide variety of software to assemble the scans or write your own since the format is quite simple and is plain text. Depending on the settings used in Caveatron Process, there may be a few lines of headers, but after that each line represents a single point in semicolon delimited format that looks something like this:

28.75778961;-3.61868501;-20.45462036;-0.660049;0.735570;0.15

The first threes numbers are the x,y,z coordinates of the point in meters. The final three numbers is the x,y,and z orientations of the normal vector for that point. The normal is required if you want to reconstruct the point cloud into a rendered mesh.

A link to examples of assembled point cloud files and rendered STL meshes can be found in another thread I just responded to.

Joe

[Casey Anderson]

Hello Joe, 

Thank you for taking the time to respond and for your example of how a .cvl is formatted.   

I'll take your advice and continue to use the caveatron process for the interpretation.  If I can spin up a useful viewer, I'llshare it out to this group.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/caveatron-discuss/54bbf0be-088d-4192-af5f-8bf4403b7358n%40googlegroups.com.