One aspect that it sounds like you've experienced is decimating a mesh. One of the things to understand is that there are difference between converting data and reverse engineering and each of these 3D software packages can handle these two sides of the equation very differently. This definitely saves SO much time in terms of having to clean up the data in post. I think as you have seen it's really ALL about getting the best scanned data from the beginning. Lucas: you may have already worked through this but if not, I've been 3D Scanning for about 20 years now, and there are SO many different ways to skin this cat. I got the this scan from last week Faro’s training: Anyone using Rhino for RE? For what I checked it’s cheaper than most SW RE Add-Ins… Recently I have been using the Rhino7 trial and testing some SubD and Lattice in Grasshopper there’s QuadRemesh that converts Mesh to SubD and later it’s possible to convert it to NURBS (plus Rebuild the surface etc). unfortunately Geomagic Design X or PolyWorks Modeler are out of question (USD 20,000 lol) The software that I have available for editing the scans are: Materialise Magics, Blender and PolyWorks Inspector Premium (comes with Modeler Light - that can edit the mesh a little better than Magics).

How do you do RE? What's your workflow? (especially using SolidWorks) Do you have any recommendations? Links, studies, pdf, videos etc

So I am looking for workflow techniques to make the bridge from STL to NURBS or maybe go straight with STL data to SolidWorks(?). I do have experience handling STL data in Materialise Magics and some topology fundamentals in Blender (clean up and manual edition), but never worked with scans and RE. My company just got a Faro arm and I will handle the Reverse Engineering to go to our LPBF printer.

Geomagic design x tutorial pdf