Hello All
Read carefully all those interested in removing the pain associated with RE. I believe that I have found the long awaited solution toolkit (and I emphasise the word solution).
I apologise in advance for my ramblings but I am very excited about what this suite of tools is going to enable me to do.
Delcam Plc, a CAD CAM software vendor well known within the tooling market place, kindly invited me to their recent international sales partner event. This gave me the opportunity to view all of their products with respect to RE.
They have a suite of tools called the Power Solution which embraces the power of OLE and Visual Basic. The result is a set of tools which I believe can solve all RE avenues.
CopyCAD is their front end tool which will read and handle all types of point cloud data whether it be unordered, scanline or structured grid data. It even has different algorithms (for triangulation etc) to maximise upon the information held within the different types of data.
The triangulation (polygonisation) algorithms are in my opinion only paralleled by that available within Polyworks.
The process of fitting accurate surface patches is quick, simple, and interactive (I know it's hard to believe). In fact we managed to fit surfaces to my benchmark data set in minutes!! It even generated the error maps (points to surface) automatically.
The one feature that I have not seen in any other RE products is that of wrapping 3D decoration and textures onto surface geometry. Wrap, a module within CopyCAD, allowed them to add a complex 3d logo to the multi-curved surface we created. The result was exported as a water tight STL model (for RP or high speed milling).
They also have a module called TriFIX in CopyCAD which cleans up the model ready for RP. I am told that this tool on it's own is used by the RP&T centre at Warwick University (the largest in Europe).
The OLE link means that surfaces generated in CopyCAD can be pushed directly into their hybrid modelling package called PowerSHAPE. The
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
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