Mechanical engineers and designers can speed up and streamline reverse engineering, design and redesign by harnessing the efficiency and precision provided by 3D scanning. Prior to the advent of laser scanners, reverse engineering and redesign involved manually measuring an object’s dimensions. The process was painstakingly slow with much room for human error. 3D scanners offer precise and fast measurement capture that speeds up the measurement process, drastically reduces errors and increases accuracy.
With 3D scanning, measurements in 3 dimensions are recorded to “point clouds”, which describe the X, Y, Z position of a point on the scanned object’s surface. 3D laser scanning can result in tens of millions of points. Point cloud data can then be imported into design software and used to create meshes and 3D models.