Young Mopar fan bringing the A-925 to life.

Cuda416 said

Slight correction.

This type of scanning creates point clouds, not STL files. STL files are created _from_ point clouds and are only a shell, not a "solid" nor are they any sort of CAD file.

Still, if the point clouds are of significant resolution, they could be a very good basis for taking measurements and creating a real model from which something would be machined.

Click to expand...

Depending on the software, some optical scanners go directly from the point cloud to a generic solid or STL (which are surface only). Most cad I've dealt with can make a solid from a decent quality STL pretty easily though.

Way back in the day if we reverse engineered something, we had to use CMM data which came in as a raw point cloud. It created a lot of extra mouse-miles when starting from that. Some CAD programs though(like CoCreate) could actually build a decent curved surface from a point cloud. For other software (ProE, Solidworks, Inventor) we wrote some Macros to create meshes as reference geometry.

It's been a while since I haven't gotten at least an STL surface output from a scanner, but if points were the output I expect there's more tools available these days to speed up the process of generating a solid.