Scanning and reverse engineering

My job involves doing technical support for Rhino. A common question I get is: "I have a scanned part and I need to turn it into a NURBS model". This can be a difficult and time-consuming task but it can be done using native Rhino tools or a reverse engineering plugin for Rhino A little over a year ago, I wrote a document that describes this process and the techniques involved using just native Rhino commands. It covers analyzing the mesh to determine what kind of clean-up may be needed. Once the mesh is cleaned up and made water-tight, it is ready for rapid prototype printing. The second part of the document describes how to manually reverse engineer NURBS surfaces from the mesh.

http://download.rhino3d.com/download.asp?id=ScanCleanupRemodel -John Brock