© 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Rapidform is used for scientific research every day, but rarely does it help with such an important discovery as this: ancient human footprints found in Kenya reveal that our ancestors had similar height, weight and walking patterns to us.  Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in the UK used a 3D scanner to capture these fossilized footprints and studied them with Rapidform.  You can read the news about this fascinating case or examine the paper published in Science, replete with various Rapidform-generated images.

Professor Bennett performed a variety of measurements of the footprints using Rapidform, and generated beautiful color maps showing the depth of each footprint in the prehistoric mud.  The cover of the Feb 27, 2009 issue of Science featured one of these color maps made in Rapidform. This important research made worldwide headlines because the findings represent the oldest evidence of modern-human foot anatomy.

This is another great example of how 3D scanning is being applied to all sorts of important work, from anthropology and medicine to manufacturing and new product development.

Source: Science Magazine [login required to read full article]

You can imagine the condition of an old field-worn military vehicle, hardly the best source for a pristine CAD model from scan data, or is it?

This isn’t any military vehicle, this is the original prototype Jeep – from Bantam — predating that Willys, Ford, or Kaiser your granddad drove in the big one. The Bantam Jeep is being restored by a group of amateur military historians, and 3rd generation reverse engineering with Rapidform XOR is making it all possible.

Michael Raphael is an advisor to the SME 3D Scanning conference, and owns Direct Dimensions; one of the premier scanning service bureaus. As such, he has the luxury of selecting from all the major point-processing software packages. Direct Dimensions knew that the 2nd generation process of Scans to Polygon Mesh to NURBS surfaces would take a lot of time and would propagate all the imperfections brought on by some failed parachute drops (where the chute didn’t open) and years of wear and tear. But Direct Dimensions also knows about Rapidform XOR.

XOR enables Direct Dimensions to generate perfected parametric CAD models from imperfect scan data of a bent, field-worn vehicle. XOR’s unique 3rd generation process eliminates the Polygon mesh and the NURBS steps, enabling Direct Dimensions to model parametric CAD models directly from the point data.

This saves time but also gives the operator the means to “model out” the dents, bends and other imperfections, and create an “idealized” model. With accurate CAD models, the customer is able to reproduce the “design intent” with a fully native CAD model in Solidworks, complete with the history tree.

See images of the process from Direct Dimensions here.