Abstract— The development process of creating 3D models such as characters, objects and landscapes is very time-consuming. This paper explores some new alternative methodologies (algorithms, software, techniques) to shorten this development time. This has relevance to more generic applications in 3D virtual environments, particularly through the use of 3D target models and 3D optical scanning technology. The work shows how high-resolution 3D models acquired by software or scanning can be analysed in a common format for practical use as imports into a game or other 3D virtual applications. An application for loading a 3D polygon mesh from a file has been developed as a case study to explain the methodology. This is generic enough to handle the processing of 3D data derived either from graphics design software or exported from optically scanned objects. Index Terms— 3D Scanner, OBJ file format, 3D model. I. INTRODUCTION n computer graphics, 3D models can be expressed as numerical representations of the real as well as the imaginary world [1]. They contain very large data sets comprising geometrical and appearance attributes [2] and they are used to generate complex polygonal meshes to represent the models in virtual space. The 3D models can be produced using interactive software development packages (e.g. 3D Studio Max, Maya) but these introduce a major bottleneck in the design and development process and often produce 3D models containing too much detail for practical use. The work shows how high- resolution 3D models acquired by software or scanning can be analysed in a common format for practical use as imports into a game or other 3D virtual applications. This paper is organized as following: we provide appropriate theoretical background in Section II, an overview of the 3D scanning technology in section III and present the research methodology and case study results in section IV. Section V concludes with some planned future work. II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND The computational representation of surfaces has been widely described in literature [3]. The surfaces are usually represented by a collection of vertices, edges and faces sometimes known as a polygonal mesh and defines the shape of an object. Every face of a mesh is an addition of triangles and it consists at least three vertices respectively [4]. In some surface interpolation geometries, a three dimensional mesh could be compared to a Triangular Irregular Network (TIN) locally. There is a range of commercial platforms which have the ability to create surface models from point clouds. These platforms can be open source and they offer innovative solutions for three dimensional mesh generation, visualization, interpretation and analysis, such as Leica Cyclone, 3DReshaper or Geomagic Wrap ([5], [3]). There are also open-source solutions which are robust and easy to use, such as MeshLab and CloudCompare. In particular, the MeshLab software [6] is a free, open-source software for mesh processing and editing and which generates a triangular 3D- mesh. This software works with the most common 3D file formats, such as OBJ, 3DS, PLY, STL, COLLADA, XYZ, ASC, X3D, PTX, PTS, XYZ, ASC, X3D and VRML. MeshLab is a principal software application package used in the current research along with 3Ds Max. MeshLab has a range of algorithms which can be used to reconstruct surfaces from point clouds (a point cloud is a data structure which is used to represent a collection of multi-dimensional points and used to represent three-dimensional data). In a 3D point cloud, the points usually represent the X, Y and Z geometric coordinates of an underlying sampled surface. The point clouds can be acquired from hardware sensors such as stereo cameras, 3D scanners, or generated from a computer program synthetically [7]. Current computer graphics tools allow the design and visualization of very realistic and precise 3D models. These devices can generate complex meshes with a high level of detail. This leads to a mandatory simplification procedure since the management and representation of these meshes can be very complicated and demanding of resources. This applies especially to the geometry which is produced by 3D scanning devices such as the Mephisto Extreme used in the present work which can produce surface meshes composed of 10 - 100 M Georgia Constantinou, George Wilson, Shabnam Sadeghi-Esfahlani, Marcian Cirstea Department of Computing and Technology Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, UK georgia.constantinou@anglia.ac.uk, george.wilson@anglia.ac.uk, shabnam.sadeghi-esfahlani@anglia.ac.uk, marcian.cirstea@anglia.ac.uk An Effective Approach to the Use of 3D Scanning Technology which Shortens the Development Time of 3D Models I