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Very cool...

OT: Topology brush in Silo does rule. A little bit more on that .... http://tinyurl.com/m4a6p

John - did you eventually buy your scanner?

Jonathan

No - I'm way too tight.

I can't justify the extra dollars to upgrade from SolidWorks Professional to Premium.

I'm going to look into buying Rhino later in the year, Nextengine appears to work well with Rhino. Purchasing Rhino is cheaper than upgrading to Premium (at least I think it is)

I did buy the next engine scanner last year. I was interested as well to see that rapidform has released a package that only works with the next engine scanner for 2500$ (it's essentially the same package that they sell unbranded for 25,000$)

For my line of work the scanner has been great - but you have to know how to make use of it. I think a lot of people who havn't been involved in scanning before have unrealistic expectations. ie "I though I could put the part on the turntable and after loading it in solidworks it would be ready to machine"

I've used the scanner on about 15 seperate projects, and the premium scanning tools pretty decent for their first release. (only the nurb from polygon function produces far too many patches - by contrast the rapidform xor package mentioned above will patch the same point cloud with 1% the number of patches).

It's really nice on freeform elements modelling the surface directly on top of the translucent point cloud and modifiying with the freeform feature, pushing and pulling until you get a match.

Someday when I have time (never apparently!) I want to try scanning my hand or face and importing into modo and try patching overtop of the data - should work great (better than using 2 2d photos)

Kandor

Little bit of a different view, as I actually work with scan data every day (mostly in the more engineering space, but occasionally for more art/entertainment purposes)

Havent heard much good about the NextEngine, except that it is exceptionally cheap compared to other things in the field. Doing engineering work we usually work with a arm-mounted scanner capable of picking up millions of points on a something only an inch across. Clearly this isnt needed for most artistic work, though it does help enormously for normal maps, from scan data (rather than a zbrush type approach)

Here are a couple of workflows that i use. All starting from a high-res stl. With the goal being a low res animation model (good topology etc.)

Use geomagic or rapidform to wrap a surface model to the data. Even though this is actually nurbs patchs you can then import this into Max, and using some plugins get it back to quad polys. Seems to be my method of choise lately. Then just use the high res to get the normal map.

Modo/Silo and soon Zbrush 3! all have topology fixers. I havent quite used silo enough to get my head around it but the zbrush one looks great.

again i may be tinged because we use industrial quality scanners, and do not have the next engine

Does it scan only in solidworks?


Scanning really can be amazing, but me, and the 20 other guys that work on this everyday here, definetly agree its not just a push button solution.

It scans into many neutral formats - .obj .stl etc. And I agree, you get what you pay for - I use to job out scanning and have in the past paid as much as I paid for this scanner to get ONE single thing scanned.

For me cost is the ultimate issue, if Next engine wasn't around, I wouldn't have a scanner - simple economics. So, while I agree that there are definately better scanners on the market - handyscans etc. Some of them cost from 10 to 30 times more than the Next Engine scanner.

And understanding that it isn't push button - knowing how to prep the parts, the less is more approach to scanning etc. are very important. In my line of work it's working out great. Definately better than no scanner at all....

Kandor

This would be my dream setup....being able to scan even faces and then patch model over them.

2500 is really cheap considering the speedup it offers and other scanning solutions around.

I have a dream ......

http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld? ... 3d_scanner

I completely agree that you are getting a better deal. We regularly charge even ten 20 times that for a scan of a single object. I guess the reason that we are still around is that the processing of scan data is the hard part.

Proccessing models with 100k polygons that are disorganized and have holes etc. need specialized software.

However for people with good 3d experience they can use "standard" software like 3ds max etc and still get usable models.

Good to see processes being put in the reach of people without a company budget, i think it will only further the technology.

Happy scanning!