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

Solidworks has a go at turning point clouds into nurbs surfaces. However, 1) it doesn't trim them - it leaves that for you to do and 2) at best it's just an educated guess.

If SW has difficulty with this, with the resources they can throw at it, then it is not likely that anyone else has a better solution.

For a freeware app that can do what you want please look at http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

Features
Interactive selection and deletion of portion of the mesh. Even for large models.
Painting interface for selecting, smoothing and coloring meshes.
Input/output in many formats:
import:PLY, STL, OFF, OBJ, 3DS, COLLADA, PTX, V3D, PTS, APTS, XYZ, GTS, TRI, ASC, X3D, X3DV, VRML, ALN
export:PLY, STL, OFF, OBJ, 3DS, COLLADA, VRML, DXF, GTS, U3D, IDTF, X3D
Point Clouds support. Now 3D files that are composed only by points are well supported in PLY and OBJ format.
U3D support; MeshLab is the first open source tool to provide direct conversion of 3D meshes into the U3D format. Now you can create pdf, like this with 3D objects with just MeshLab and LaTeX.
Mesh Cleaning Filters:
removal of duplicated, unreferenced vertices, null faces
removal of small isolated components
coherent normal unification and flipping
erasing of non manifold faces
automatic filling of holes
Remeshing filters:
High quality edge collapse simplification (even with texture coords preservation)
Surface reconstruction from points (a ball pivoting variant, marching cubes and poisson's reconstruction)
Subdivision surfaces (loop and butterfly)
Feature preserving smoothing and fairing filters
Holes filling
Various Colorization/Inspection filters
Gaussian and mean curvature
Border edges, geodesic distance, from borders
Non two-manifold edges and vertices
Self intersecting faces
Ambient Occlusion. An ambient occlusion field can be computed and stored per vertex
Interactive Mesh Painting
Color Painting
Selection paint
Smoothing
Measuring tool. You can take linear measures between points of the displayed meshes
Slicing tool. A new tool that allows to export planar sections of a mesh in SVG format
3D Scanning tools
Alignment ICP based range map alignment tool, for putting meshes into the same reference space.
Merging of multiple meshes the Poisson surface reconstruction source code (kindly provided by by Michael Kazhdan and Matthew Bolitho) have been included in.
OpenGL Shader based rendering (write your own shader!) compatible with Typhoon Lab's Shader Designer
Large rendering (up to 16k x 16k) for high quality printing
The history of the all performed cleaning/editing actions can be re-played on different meshes or saved and for archival purposes.
Extendible plugins based architecture, writing new mesh processing functions, colorization filters and support for different file formats is quite easy! Look at PlugIn Samples

Hi JTB - definitely a lot of good stuff in there - but I don't see NURBS ever mentioned, so probably the parts that talk about surface creation from points actually mean making a triangle mesh faceted type surface and probably not a NURBS surface like MoI uses...

- Michael

Thanks for all your answers.
Now it is clear to me that there is no easy or cheap way to transform the data...
Does anyone know a company which converst files as a service?
Maybe this would be the best way for me, as I don´t need it very often.

Thanks,
Joerg

How about Resurf3d?

someone mentioned it already in an earlier thread:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4013.5


Mesh to single NURBS

http://www.resurf3d.com/mesh2snurbs.htm


and with a price tag of "only" $119, it surprisingly produces some reasonable results.

best wishes,
marco

How detailed are the objects you are scanning? Do you have any photos of them?

There are many talented modelers here. They may be able to suggest an alternate method of modeling that avoids scanning all together.

Hi Joerg,

> Does anyone know a company which converst files as a service?

I was hoping someone else might have heard of something like that, but I'm not aware of any services that do this type of stuff myself though.

You probably should also ask the people who make that laser scanner that you were looking at originally - they might know if any service like that is available somewhere.

- Michael