Photogrammetry 3D Scan Mesh Cleanup & Texture Reprojection in Blender
Learn how to turn messy photogrammetry point clouds and high-polygon raw scans into production-ready 3D assets with clean UV unwrapping.
Photogrammetry produces highly accurate surface details, but raw outputs frequently contain internal geometry artifacts, floating polygon islands, and non-manifold edges that break real-time rendering pipelines.
1. Removing Non-Manifold Geometry and Isolated Islands
In Blender Edit Mode, select Select > Select All by Trait > Non Manifold to isolate holes and degenerate faces. Delete loose geometry and use the Grid Fill operator to patch open surface boundaries cleanly.
2. Quad Remeshing and UV Packing
Duplicate the cleaned scan mesh to serve as the high-poly reference. Apply Blender’s Voxel Remesh or Quad Remesher extension to generate a uniform, low-poly quad layout. Perform a clean UV unwrap using Smart UV Project with an island margin of 0.002 to prevent texture bleeding.
3. Baking High-Poly Texture Maps to Low-Poly UVs
Set the rendering engine to Cycles. In the Bake settings, check Selected to Active, select the high-poly raw scan first, shift-select the low-poly remeshed asset second, and set an Ray Distance offset of 0.01 to transfer diffuse texture and normal details cleanly.