Cheap 3D scanning for engine swaps

Packaging and project planning.

Played around with this a little this morning. My work laptop video card is just too slow to handle it (Quadro 1000m). It could get a bit of scanning in, but as soon as I tried to move or rotate around an object, it would fail. I may give it a shot on the desktop (Quadro 5000), or do something more purpose built.

Try running the mesh through Meshlab and simplifying it first before importing it into CAD. That's what worked for me. http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

Well, the problem isn't the CAD side, its the actual capture from within ReconstructMe. It has a painfully slow frame rate and can't handle any quick movements of the Kinect.

Tried it on the home PC... ReconstructMe gets stuck initializing. Seems pretty buggy at this point :(

In other news, one of my coworkers just made a pretty damn good scan of a detailed object using Catch123d and his cell phone. I was very impressed.

ProDarwin wrote:

Warren v wrote: ReconstructMe poops the data out in .ply format. Meshlab will take that and export a file compatible with just about any 3D modeling software. I use .stl the most.

How do you use the .stl? All the cad software I have used will not let you actually USE a .stl file - you can see it, scale it, rotate it, but not pick points from it, create planes, or otherwise "engineer" from it. It looks like all of the Meshlab export formats are some form of Mesh (fitting, I know), which always has this limitation in the engineering CAD world. Edit: 3d dxf/dwg? Is that what you use?

ThHat's what I was wondering as well - I've used STL's in SolidWorks as a reference, but that's about all. Anny attempt to pull actual point data has been fruitless. That was several years ago though. Maybe it's better now?

I haven't tried SW. I do know I can pick points in Rhino, but it is an annoying, tedious process. The points aren't traditional endpoints, midpoints, centers, etc. - they are the vertices of the generated 3D mesh. So you need to pick points to draw normal curves with before you can pick useful points from those lines.

I'm going to try skanect and see if I have any better luck.