If you’re thinking about the possibilities of model making, you need to familiarize yourself with 3D scanning. This technology can make a wide variety of things possible that otherwise wouldn’t be. You can literally scan anything in the world and get a three-dimensional digital model as a result. It only takes minutes and it’s the perfect way to create digital models for a wide variety of purposes.
What can this technology accomplish? Just about anything. Here are a few examples.
You can scan in parts of a product to compare it to the manufacturer parts as described in a CAD model. You can reverse engineer items by scanning them in, making a digital model, then manufacturing them. You can scan buildings to create 3D models from them. You can even make CAD models of objects to make changes to designs or updates to products.
This technology is quite advanced and simplifies a lot of procedures. The scanners themselves can be fixed or handheld and use lights, x-rays, or lasers to capture data points on an object. These data points are used to put together a polygon mesh from which a model is made. This model can then be used for many purposes, as discussed above.
3D scanning is immensely useful. It captures data and makes sense of it that would otherwise be extremely daunting to sort through. Software like Rapidform makes this possible. It processes the data, condenses it, and outputs a usable model. It would be next to impossible to calculate all of this by hand and hiring someone to make a CAD model from scratch would be very expensive, indeed.
From here, many things can be done from inspection to digital archiving, to 3D printing. What is done with the data after it’s collected varies and depends on the end goal. What remains the same, however, is how this technology streamlines applications. You don’t have to worry about CAD model complexity anymore. 3D scanning takes the guesswork out of it for you, leaving behind complete models to be used however you wish. At the end of the day, anything that makes model making a little bit simpler and a little less time-consuming, is good for production as a whole. It helps to ensure the parts of a whole are complete and accurate. It also has the added benefit of bringing the latest technology to a greater number of people.