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| MeshLab | The custom conversion program relies on the free PerlMagick add-on to read the GIF animation. This add-on doesn't do too well with certain GIF animation compression techniques, but works for Andrew's animations. It was chosen because of a lack of a good GIF animation reader in other languages. The Perl conversion program itself is incredibly slow and memory intensive, as it reads in the whole animation and creates a voxel grid for processing. It takes about 10-20 minutes to convert an animation to a model. Slow, but the critical factor was speed of programming, not execution - Perl is a fine language for quickly hacking out small programs.
The resulting mesh had almost two million triangles. Garland's Quadric Edge Collapse decimation algorithm in MeshLab, an open-source mesh manipulation program, was used to reduce this to 100,000 triangles. It is interesting to note that both the GIF compression and marching cubes algorithms were patented; the GIF LZW patent expired in 2003, marching cubes in 2005. |
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| Sketchfab |
