Reverse Engineering:
Suppose you have a part with no documentation, or you need to scale a complex piece of sculpture, or create a replacement part for an old out of production item. However, the part is very complex and difficult to measure. These are perfect applications for laser scanning.
Metropolis offers non-contact laser scanning with our Minolta 910i scanner. This device will record 307,200 data points in about two seconds. Complex objects can be scanned from any available angle and successive scans joined together to form a complete, detailed file of the surface geometry of the part.
Once the part is scanned and the data collected we have tens of thousands of data points forming a "point cloud." Point clouds have no other characteristics other than being a group of unrelated points in space. Therefore, the point cloud has limited utility. Next, the point cloud is converted to a polygonal model. This is a file type wherein the point cloud data points are connected one to another to form triangles and polygons. These are filled in to create a surface. As you may imagine, this surface is complex and still represents a low level of usability. So the next step is to use the polygonal model as a basis for surface modeling. This step can be very detail intensive and time consuming, depending on the level of detail and precision required. Once the surface model is complete, all standard manufacturing and RP processes can be performed from the file.
