I am a newbie to Blender and 3D modelling generally (ok, I have written some 3D software, eg. “hflab” for heightfields, but that was a long time ago. And it was pretty crude :-).
It seems that most of the tools out there assume you are starting with low-poly geometric primitives and then building up complexity by hand. Just recently I came across the (free / non-open) “DAVID-Laserscanner” software which generates a .OBJ mesh from a physical object, using a video camera and laser line generator, by the triangulation method. I already had a camera and a laser-level so I tried it out on a ceramic face sculpture. It is quite simple to use. My very first result was crude, but I think promising. http://www.david-laserscanner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=173
The output of this scanner program is a fairly high density mesh. To get a good model, it looks like I will need to generate many such meshes scanned from different angles and merge them together, and do a fair amount of cleanup, hole-filling, smoothing, spurious geometry removal, etc. Is there any recommended software for this purpose? Of particular interest is software in the “free” category.
It appears to have a demo version, so you might be able to use that.
I also remember a couple buttons in Blender where you could tell it to show more or fewer edges in wireframe mode. It wouldn’t actually change the mesh, but it was faster for the 3d view. I’m not sure whether we still have this feature or not… I think it was in the edit buttons window.
For Super High resolution scanned models (around 4 million polys) I use Zbrush and the re-topo tools.
Zbrush Makes dealing with Hires meshes a breeze!!! only time I start getting lagged down is around 9 million quad polys .
Zbrush is a nice textureing tool too, you might want to give one of the demos a try
