Hi Joerg,

> Maybe the other way round: is there any affordable
> 3d scanner which produces data I can work with in MoI?

Well, the scanners themselves all just record a big cloud of points.

It's fairly easy to construct triangle mesh data from a big cloud of sampled points by connecting 3 points nearby each other into a triangle face, but it's not so easy to reverse engineer smooth large NURBS surface patches from that big mass of points.

There are various kinds of (often pretty expensive) reverse engineering software that are specialized for that task though, so you would need to take your scanned data into one of those programs which will then produce NURBS surfaces, often times with some guidance from you for how to arrange the patch boundaries, and then that NURBS data could be taken into MoI.

So you need some additional software to bridge the gap between these 2 different worlds of point clouds to CAD/NURBS surface data.

See here for some links to a few different reverse engineering programs:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2469.3

You might try looking into some of the Rhino plug-ins which I don't think are quite as expensive as the standalone stuff.

- Michael