I work with several 3d scanners for several months...

I confirm ZBrush (4R7) is probably the best choice to treat scanned organic models. Thomas Roussel from Pixologic have made a complete 4 hours tutorial on the subject (in french but I guess this exists also in english). You can find it on www.polysculpt.com. The last version is 64 bits and will allow to treat more than 30 millions polygons scans...

If you need pure reverse enginering from mechanical parts, then Spacelaim is probably a better alternative because you will be able to produce .STEP or .IGES or .3DM file (Zbrush is limited to .OBJ)

Pierre

Hello,

I've picked up Mesh2Surface, it's a slick piece of software for this sort of work, and being a Rhino plugin it has smooth I/O with MoI. At this point it's probably not great for highly organic parts, but for the model you posted it looks like you could have ended up with a very respectable solid with low deviation in around an hour or less since it looks like you could slice through that scan to sketch your profiles. I regularly load scans with millions of polys inside of Rhino on decent hardware without issue, although my scans are not super high resolution, rather around 75-80 microns point to point.

I guess it depends on what business you're in, if you're scanning object to use as digital assets then something like ZBrush or 3DCoat is more up your alley. If it's reverse engineering, design, analysis that you're doing it's probably better to just jump into tools like Rhino, Tsplines, VSR, Mesh2Surface (and MoI of course) to get to your solid models for prototyping and manufacture.

Hi, speaking about NURBS, I don't think, it's a good idea to convert Zbrush mesh to NURBS. If your scanning soft can export point clouds, you can then turn the cloud to NURBS. Here you can find the instruction. Not sure about your scanner and software you use, but I use this, to get point clouds.

Looks great but well out of my price range.
At 1/10th the cost I'd be tempted...