Cyberstrak plugin: Point cloud reverse engineering capabilities

[lander (CAD CAM CNC)]

@Peter_Salzman

Concerning Scan alignment, what exactly is needed?

Well, I’ve been a part of the 3D scanning industry for a fair amount of time now, ever since about 2006-2007ish.

During this time I’ve learned alot about what it takes to obtain high quality digital models of objects which are to be scanned.

Unfortunately there’s been some odd shifts in the industry, and I would say that alot of the options that users have these days, aren’t going in the right direction – imo.

However, relative to the direction I think it should go, I believe that the scanning process should include the ability for software to have an algorithmic stage in the workflow whereby the user can spend the necessary time to align scanned data prior to the following stages where the scans become merge/fused together.

Otherwise what culminates in the workflow is compounding errors.

And this is the misfortune of the fallacy that the industry is leading everyone. The erroneous belief that 3d scanners should give the user no other options for alignment but to rely on the bad sofware algos to align aimlessly.

Users in the 3d scanning industry are being ever more lead down a path that it’s ok to be moving the scanner around all the time and relying on the software to automatically align everything behind the scenes.

The result of todays trends, are simply very bad quality scans.

@Peter_Salzman

Do you talk about scans of the same object coming from different scan processings that need to be adjusted to each other?

Yes, and no. The algorithms I believe are possible, don’t necessarily need to have any few meshes make sense to eachother, but to merely fit them the best as possible.

In otherwords, when scans do correlate and are of the same subject, then yes they’ll likely fit nicely, while also users could theoretically use the same algos to play around and fit completely unrelated objects together in a best fitment scenario – per say.

@Peter_Salzman

With overlappings and different 3d orientation and stuff like that?

Yes. Of course overlappings etc, will most likely include erroneous data that should otherwise be trimmed prior to alignment algos and be reduced in error as to prevent tolerance deviations etc. in earlier stages of the workflow.

I’ll try to add a few links, where I’ve tried to distill down these theories as I see them:

Scanning object with iRhino3D WIP

I have some ideas about this type of technology that are very refined from very extensive experience. I’ll try to boil it down very simply here: 1.) The best 3D capture is always one that is taken from a very stable position – regardless of how motion friendly the implications are, i.e. “hand-held-scanners”. The common ‘dream’ of scanning objects where the scanner is constantly moving around and expected to capture ‘everything’ accurately and patch it all together flawlessly – is a false hope…

Scanning object with iRhino3D WIP

Well, it has mostly to do with everything I witnessed and experience in my extensive time being an active user of reverse engineering tools and workflows over almost a period of 2 decades. Basically it boils down to the fact that scanning technology doesn’t do a very good job seamlessly stitching together 4-dimensional-space-time. Therefore, 3D-scans are of higher quality and are more accurate when they’re thought of as smaller constituents of the overall picture. Meaning, rather than trying…