Young Mopar fan bringing the A-925 to life.

Cuda416 said

Ok, I'll play along... the scanner doesn't know what an edge is, that is a single break in a plane. it "sees" a crap ton of points that can be used to "guess" with a high probability of being correct, that a bunch of points, situated closely together, within a certain tolerance, "could" be an edge . further, point clouds, that are turned into STL files are just a collection of triangles that make up a mesh...

Scanners don't "scan" STL's anymore than a radar knows what and aircraft "looks" like. The scanner could have software internal to it that does a conversion to an STL (a shell) but even if you scan a "knife" you are likely to get an "edge" made of a billion points.

And yes, I 100% agree that things have gotten easier, but the beginning "point" (pun intended) is still a point cloud, regardless of what the machine spits out.


Fair?

-=C

Click to expand...

Can't 100% agree based on the tech we've been employing recently. Iterative surface mapping basically bypasses the point collection and streamlines the scan process. The technology can in fact find edges, create curves, and generate contours. Not precisely in every instance (some geometry just isn't 'regular' enough), but it works well enough to save hundreds of hours of clean-up time when dealing with a large number of parts.

Strangely enough, one project in particular was actually a knife - the edge came in with two curves, a straight line and a spline which fit the curved tip. It took a few tries to set the right level of detail to avoid getting jagged results but we eventually got a very good surface model with only a few hundred more surfaces than a proper parametric model would have had (mostly due to the sharpened edge).

The trade-off is that accuracy isn't as exact, and operator proficiency plays a bigger role than when starting with point data.