Thanks Peter, the candle is now on the tracker.
https://library.ldraw.org/parts/49747
https://library.ldraw.org/parts/49748
The entire cylinder with collar and interior has been made out of primitives. The scanned mesh didn't really affect those. It was quite tricky to turn the part exactly vertical. Partly because the cylinder in the mesh wasn't perfectly round. Furthermore, LDPE uses the y axis instead of the z axis for vertical.
The flame was almost completely guided by the scanned mesh. Unfortunately for me, there were a few downsides to reducing the amount of triangles to such a low number. The hole on top was smaller in the mesh due to the lack of scanning depth inside the hole, which allowed the outer surface vertexes to dominate the edge points during the rounding/reducing algorithm. Secondly, the tiny geometrical features (size about 1 LDU) at the interface between the yellow and white parts above the outer collar were smoothed away. These had to be recreated manually. There were also some rounding to the curvature of the flame near the ledge, which had to be manually corrected.
One sixth of the flame had some wavy vertical stripes that needed manual correction/smoothing. The number of triangles that needed to be flipped was quite low and the number of vertexes that had to be merged was also low.
I can easily see a workable pipeline from a scanned mesh into a geometry ready for the tracker. My only wish for the future would be to retain more triangles before switching over to LDPE since that would enable the accurate modelling of also smaller features. The downside of this may be the uneven reduction of triangles needed on the scanning side. If need be, I could work with two files of differing number of triangles to get the best out of both.
The edge lines and cond lines in the file were effectively useless. I deleted them very early on and recreated only the cond lines I needed in the end using Edger2 in LDPE.
https://library.ldraw.org/parts/49747
https://library.ldraw.org/parts/49748
The entire cylinder with collar and interior has been made out of primitives. The scanned mesh didn't really affect those. It was quite tricky to turn the part exactly vertical. Partly because the cylinder in the mesh wasn't perfectly round. Furthermore, LDPE uses the y axis instead of the z axis for vertical.
The flame was almost completely guided by the scanned mesh. Unfortunately for me, there were a few downsides to reducing the amount of triangles to such a low number. The hole on top was smaller in the mesh due to the lack of scanning depth inside the hole, which allowed the outer surface vertexes to dominate the edge points during the rounding/reducing algorithm. Secondly, the tiny geometrical features (size about 1 LDU) at the interface between the yellow and white parts above the outer collar were smoothed away. These had to be recreated manually. There were also some rounding to the curvature of the flame near the ledge, which had to be manually corrected.
One sixth of the flame had some wavy vertical stripes that needed manual correction/smoothing. The number of triangles that needed to be flipped was quite low and the number of vertexes that had to be merged was also low.
I can easily see a workable pipeline from a scanned mesh into a geometry ready for the tracker. My only wish for the future would be to retain more triangles before switching over to LDPE since that would enable the accurate modelling of also smaller features. The downside of this may be the uneven reduction of triangles needed on the scanning side. If need be, I could work with two files of differing number of triangles to get the best out of both.
The edge lines and cond lines in the file were effectively useless. I deleted them very early on and recreated only the cond lines I needed in the end using Edger2 in LDPE.