Re: Newbie's opening volley.

From: Bert VandenBerg (bert@hymarc.com)
Date: Mon Jan 25 1999 - 16:13:25 EET


Paul Burr wrote:
> my employer, Giovanni Jewelry (100 Nashua St, Providence, RI )
> is looking to expand our capabilities with 3D scanning. This is
> a new area for us, and we'll need all the advice I can gather.

Almost certainly, you will need to use software to process the scan-data
into a format suitable for JewelCad. If you want polynomial
(spline/nurb) surfaces
then you might consider:

- surfacer (from Imageware). it offers a broad toolkit, and has good
tools to go from a scan cloud, to nurb surface model. Prices depend on
what you get.

- surface studio (from Alias Wavefront). This software features
excellent tools for creating surfaces, and can handle large scandata
data sets.

- paraform. This is a new company/software that has strength in
integrating scan views, but has some ability to surface the data. I
have not seen this software in action.

- I believe Delcam's ArtCAM has capabilities for creating artistic
surfaces. Delcam also has a design module, and a machining module
capable of handling the large quantities of data that you get from
scanners.

- geomagic wrap (from raindrop geomagic). This software's capabilities
are primarily related to creating polygonal models from scandata clouds,
but I believe you can slice them to extract
iges spline section profiles.

- Innovmetric's polyworks. This software is good for scan-view
integration and polygon model building. However you can build
polygomial surfaces on the models, and export them as IGES.

> and, are there any file translation packages that can tweek
> scanner output into the "flavor" that I need?

?brockware? might be able to transform between different surface
representations in IGES files.

However if you have point-cloud, or polygon-cloud data from a scanner,
you currently need interactive tools to build a surface model from this
data, and those tools need to be able to handle large quantities of
(point or polygon) data.

By the way, Hymarc make a laser scanner you might consider.
It offers fast data, dense data acquisition at good accuracy. Check out
our web site, or contact me at the coordinates below.

-- 
Bert van den Berg                   E-mail: bert@hymarc.com
Hymarc Ltd.                           http://www.hymarc.com
35 Antares Drive                        Tel: (613) 727-1584
Ottawa, Ontario  K2E 8B1                Fax: (613) 727-0441

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