Kubotek Forum

Not a quick and easy routine. Not that I know of anyway. But I sure as heck wish there were. I have a desk top laser scanner and I'd love to be able to easily convert some scans to editable CAD.

You could "trace" the body, snapping to the nodes as you go, to make a 3D wire frame model. Then convert that to a solid body. But that's rather laborious. And might not be as precise as you might want it. Depending on the accuracy of your scan.

As I understand it, there is some 3rd party software that can do it. But I hear it rather expensive.

If you have point data in ASCII format you might be able to get some useful geometry in KeyCreator using:

Create>Spline>NURBS from Data

I have used Rhino 3D to generate planar, lofted NURBS through point clouds, but it will not convert an STL file to a NURBS object.  The computations and sippositions to do that are huge.  I ahve heard that GeoMAgic is a good program for it, but $$$.  I have never used it.

The STL - DWG conversions I have seen out of programs like MeshLab are basically faceted shells.  Pretty useless geometry for the most part.

You will get a lot of use from some free software named "GOM Insolect" from the www.gom.com website.

GOM Inspect is excellent at handling massive STL files.
It offers very many powerful utilities to edit and clean STL files and delivers the ability extract prismatic geometry such as planes, cylinders, cones, spheres, etc.
All created geometry can be exported to IGES and imported into KeyCreator.
You can extract single or multiple section curves as polylines.
These can be converted to splines and then surfaces in KeyCreator.
Once a CAD model is created you can import the SOLID or Surface model into GOM Inspect for validation against the original STL data and make professional reports on the results.

This is an excellent Tool for KeyCreator users who wish to reverse engineer STL files into KeyCreator CAD models.

Barry