Young Mopar fan bringing the A-925 to life.

A925guy said
I didnt thank about the macro approach. Right now, I extruded the overall solid. Inventor has a feature where you can paint brush select multiple stl triangles and the program can generate a spline surface. Then i use that to remove material. Just discovered it last night.

Oof. I'm a fan of 'use what works', but I've found over the years it's often better to not use the original data to constrain model features/geometry.

Often making a 'fresh' model and massaging it to match the scan data will result in something more usable for your manufacturers. If in doubt, share yo

Cuda416 said
Good points, but the term "Iterative surface mapping" itself, infers that multiple points are measured/scanned etc.

I'm done being a pain, you clearly have loads more actual real wold experience. I'll go out saying this debate is largely semantics. No matter what process is applied, the scan still begins as points, but to your point (there's that pun again) you are able to bypass the point cloud. I however, would rather have the point cloud as raw data and apply an "Iterative surface mapping" process as a second step, if even manual.

I look forward to seeing what is done with this.

You're not being a pain - I find this field pretty fascinating and was surprised by how far it's come since I did my first scans almost 20 years ago.. so I share my more recent experience since you obviously have some interest/use. It definitely IS largely semantics, but the newer process doesn't necessarily use discreet 'points' these days. To me, a point implies that specific xyz locations are tracked on a part, which is how the older methods DID work (and for laser CMM, and plenty of other scanning tech in-use now). But that came at a cost of having to have a fixed part/scanner and lots of movement tracking which made large or very complex surfaces difficult to manage.

But the newer stuff is done with moving parts/moving scanners and so tracking xyz points-in-space is not as feasible. However, if 'points' is used as a descriptor for surface/depth geometry, then yes - all scanners are basically 'point' collecting :)

The point cloud definitely has it's uses, and whether I'd want one would depend on the project. For very precise stuff that happens to have some complex geometry I too would want both because I know laser-mapped points are going to be accurate to typically about .002, whereas the iterative surfaces are often .020 at best. But the surface mapped stuff will get me close in shape/function with far less work/effort. Usually the precise stuff I can measure directly with conventional tools and simply model that into the curved solid. But for me, having 'both' means having to pay two contractors to do it and increases the schedule too. Even if one place could do both for me, I wouldn't trust it because there would be an incentive for them to make one match the other - with no guarantee either is precise (fell for that before, lots of money wasted and I still couldn't get my stampings made).