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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. This model in particular was a challenge, as it had a large number of frames and a huge output file.
The resulting mesh has over eleven million triangles. To successfully load it into MeshLab, most other programs had to be shut down to provide enough system memory. Garland's Quadric Edge Collapse decimation algorithm in MeshLab, an open-source mesh manipulation program, was used to reduce this model 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 |
