"No overlapping meshes" error during ICP alignment of thin/linear meshes
06:59 06 Jan 2026

I am new to MeshLab and I'm struggling to align two meshes using the ICP (Iterative Closest Point) tool. I want to fit a yellow mesh onto a blue mesh. As seen in the screenshot below, these are very thin, strip-like structures:

mesh

The Problem: When I run Process, I get the following error:

 Starting Processing of 2 glued meshes out of 2 meshes
 Computing Overlaps 2 glued meshes...
 Failure. There are no overlapping meshes?
 No candidate alignment arcs. Nothing Done. 

My current setup:

  • I have used the Align Tool

  • The blue mesh is marked as "Base" (Glue Here).

  • The yellow mesh is also "Glued" after point-based-gluing

  • I am using the default ICP parameters.

What I've tried:

  • Scaling meshes so they have close initial size.
  • Manually move them so they do intersect
  • Messing a little with "Minimal Starting Distance" might be too low for these thin geometries, but I'm not sure what values are appropriate.

Questions:

  • Should I modify my meshes to have ICP work?
  • Are there specific parameters (like Sample Number or Target Distance) I should adjust for thin, linear meshes to ensure the algorithm finds an overlap?

Any hints to get this moving would be greatly appreciated!

Regards, Julien

meshlab