Very interesting Mark.
If they had a Mac version, I would buy it straight away...
Thanks,
JL

I'm pretty sure that Solidworks (Office Premium only) uses it own Scan to 3D software to create the model. Next Engine most likely only provides a seamless delivery to Solidworks.

tom

lebeau,

What is your method for turning scanned organic shapes into CAD Models.

Mark

lebeau: "I would still like to have control over the surfaces after they were created."

An English marine engineer named Marcus Bole releases his PolyCAD program as freeware at www.polycad.co.uk . It's superb for mesh to spline surface conversion or vice versa and makes it as simple as it's possible to be to edit (subdivide, rebuild, or simplify, global or local) either surface type manually as opposed to automatically like INUS RapidForm does. IGES surfaces exported from PolyCAD import well into ViaCAD and accept all the usual manipulations. As well, Marcus' .geo format is clear plain english and numerical, so it's possible to create a file purely textually, or import .csv polyline coordinates. PolyCAD is good to work with and plays well with punchcad.

sorry, difference of opinion. Meshlab is semi automatic mesh or subdivision surface manipulation, doesn't work with spline surfaces at all, and doesn't offer the same level of manual control as PolyCAD. Horses for courses, but Meshlab isn't CAD.

It doesn't address the PC-only thing, but PolyCAD IS free. It's stated on Polycad's home page, at right, near the top of page. Marcus does require that users register it after a month, but at no cost. I use the free David laserscanner system, and Meshlab helps out with cleaning raw data, but it doesn't give usable finished geometry, and it sounds like the Nextengin software doesn't either. I've seen impressive direct scan-to-near-finished-surface results from Rainbow Geometric and INUS RapidForm, but they're both out of my price range, so I've got to use the tools available to me. However, taking geometry numberically into Polycad from .obj is quite easy, and PolyCAD gives NURB handling features that are as powerful or more so than the big dogs, but not as automatic. I'm more used to working with conventional (AutoCAD and similar) CAD, so I do find PolyCAD's user interface to be more intuitive than much of ViaCAD, but intuition is a subjective thing.

Zumer,

Are you sure about ability to perform usual operations with IGES surfaces imported to Shark/ViaCad?
Not knowing PolyCad well enough I have used demo version of Rapid Works to automatically create IGES surface from scan and imported to Shark/ViaCad, but there is not much I can do with it.
What am I doing wrong?

Mac OSX10.5, Shark/ViaCad

Zumer,

You are absolutely wright. There is a lot I can do with IGES Surfaces in Shark/ViaCad. My setup for testing was wrong.

Mark

Mark, give me a couple of days and I'll patch together a demo and some instructions. It's not hard, except that in some cases entities are complicated and need to be reduced to be workable.

Thank you very much.

Mark