MeshLab
There were a lot of people doing 3D scanning at SIGGRAPH this year. Chris stopped and talked to several of them and came back with several scans like this one:
I’d like to print this, but there are a couple of holes down by the feet that need fixing first. I downloaded MeshLab because I’d heard a lot of good things about it. I figured it’d be just the tool for this job. Unfortunately, when I run the “Close Holes” filter, I get this:
Hm. I looked on the forums a bit, and apparently it’s notorious for this kind of problem. I guess I need to start looking at other tools. Most of the other ones I’ve looked at so far kind of choke on the 1M polys in this model. The decimation in MeshLab seems pretty solid. Perhaps the best approach is to decimate in MeshLab and then export to another program which is better at making things watertight. It seems desirable to close the shell before decimating though. Any thoughts on what tools would be better here?
You could try a demo version of FastRBF toolbox.
I believe that it will make the mesh watertight and decimate in one go if you want.
It may not handle the colours.