[Legend2440]

You can convert splats into meshes using a simple marching cubes algorithm.

But the meshes produced are not easy to edit.

[dheera]

Generating good meshes sounds like a problem for a completely different machine learning algorithm to me.

[MITSardine]

Meshing has been around long before machine learning came to prominence, there's plenty of methods to improve surface meshes already.

[Legend2440]

None of which work.

There is no good method to take a 3D scan and make a sensible mesh out of it. They tend to have far more vertices than necessary and lack structure.

[MITSardine]

I don't know what you mean by lacking structure, but perhaps you are not aware of all the tools that exist, because fixing surface meshes is a rather classic problem. Just type "surface remeshing" or "surface mesh optimization" on google scholar and you'll see thousands of results.

This is a separate problem from triangulation (turning point clouds into meshes) done with entirely different algorithms. It's likely the software you used for this assumes the user will then turn to other software to improve their surface mesh.

Even for operations that are naturally in sequence, you will often find the software to carry out those steps is separated. For instance turning CAD into a surface mesh is one software, turning a surface mesh into a tetrahedral volume mesh another (if those are hexahedra, then yet another), and then optimizing or adapting those meshes is done by yet another piece of software. And yet these steps are carried out each time an engineer goes from CAD to physical simulation. So it's entirely possible the triangulation software you used does not implement any kind of surface optimization and assumes the user will then find something else to deal with that.