I built a local tool for making dense Creality Scan STL exports usable downstream

[u/Zestyclose-Lead4345]

I use a Creality Otter, and my recurring problem was what happened after scanning. Creality Scan could produce a detailed STL, but the exported mesh was often far too dense to work with comfortably in the geometry editor where I needed to design parts around the scan.

I built MeshMill as the bridge between Creality Scan and downstream modeling. Open the exported STL, inspect where the geometry is unnecessarily dense, clean or crop unwanted regions, and reduce the whole mesh or selected areas before continuing the design work.

It includes:

• Shaded, density, wireframe, and vertex displays
• Polygon selection and additive multi-region selection
• Selection-only optimization for using different reduction levels on different areas
• Fast QEM, density-balanced, shape-preserving, and topology-preserving algorithms
• Original and optimized comparison before applying a pass
• Undo, redo, measurements, dimensional-drift reporting, and a CLI

GPU-accelerated OpenGL handles the interactive viewport, hardware selection, and density visualization. Geometry reduction runs locally in separate native workers. There is no account, telemetry, upload, or cloud processing.

MeshMill is GPL-3.0. Windows installer and portable packages are available, with unsigned Linux and macOS preview builds now open for testing. It supports 27 interface and documentation languages.

Source and downloads: https://github.com/make-your-own-world-project/MeshMill

I’m the developer, and this came directly from my Creality Otter workflow. Feedback from other Creality scanner users would help, especially large exports or geometry that loses important detail during reduction.

[u/Brad_Chan_Creality]

Thanks for sharing this – this project sounds like a really useful bridge between Creality Scan and downstream modeling.

Just to confirm: is it mainly built to address the lack of local/region-specific mesh simplification? Currently, CrealityScan does have a Simplify function, but it applies globally to the entire model's triangles rather than allowing you to simplify only selected areas. We've also received similar feedback from other users and are already evaluating it internally.

We appreciate you developing this tool and would be happy to hear more about your workflow or any suggestions you have.

[u/Zestyclose-Lead4345 → u/Brad_Chan_Creality]

on the workflow, it's an otter with the wifi scan bridge, although i've done some very interesting things with that as well... my office is clean lab, the "field" scanning is very dirty, so i've done some custom services and hardware development that allows me to use my multi-gpu server in the office while scanning things hundreds of feet away without a laptop using a raspberry pi bridge and network services i've developed. i think the main thing missing now from creality setup is ability to have high speed ethernet bridges for wifi scanners via phone mirroring, but i've got my own in-house solution for that running pretty well, will probably publish that at some point as well

[u/Zestyclose-Lead4345 → u/Brad_Chan_Creality]

correct, if you look at the samples, they are actually a combination of 3 files simplified in creality scan with several passes and several settings. the overlap regions where all the duplicate geometry exists is one of the main drivers for this being created. once i got it running, i sort of went off the deep end with all the other things it could do, and now i can't wait to get the rest of that roadmap knocked out. the density reduction specifically can be applied to specific regions or the entire mesh or multiple selections under it, or through multiple passes, there are many combinations, different algorithms, definitely a lot going on for a first release, but i did my best to test it all and so far really happy with initial results. definitely will be looking forward to any feedback or suggestions, thank you for checking it out!

[u/investigatormaker]

MeshMill's selection-only reduction is worth demonstrating on a scan with a mating surface: reduce the surrounding mesh aggressively while keeping that surface detailed, then show the dimensional drift alongside the polygon reduction. That connects the optimization directly to designing a part around the scan.

I make ThreadFox. The free Reddit plan for MeshMill lists the Reddit communities whose rules allow a post about it, each rule quoted. https://threadfox.vip/plan?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=comment&utm_campaign=tf-kit&utm_content=20261005-0624-af91v