Mesh License?

I am also leaning towards PolyWorks for the laser scanning abilities, but Inspire also looks very capable. For portable, PC-DMIS might not be the best option. I have nothing to compare with at the moment though.

At the risk of being banned... And clearly stating that I have almost no experience using the Demon for scanning (the boss hates it based on decade old information and no actual usage experience )

But alas, we have been using PolyWorks with blended touch trigger and scanning routines and it works quite well for simple datum structures. We hard probe the datums and then scan the bulk of the part. We have found that for complicated datums it can fall short, the more rigid structure of PCDMIS will help out a great deal.

We asked the Hexagon salesman for a trial of Inspire when he was onsite, but never heard anything back. That lack of follow up did contribute to us purchasing another seat of PolyWorks. 

ArkansasBeeper said:

At the risk of being banned... And clearly stating that I have almost no experience using the Demon for scanning (the boss hates it based on decade old information and no actual usage experience 

I'd strongly recommend giving PC-DMIS portable a try, it's come a long way in the last 10 years.  My predecessor made considerable improvements for the portable arm and tracker user experience.  My current team have also added a number of improvements such as adding the constructed extracted features, adding the 3D Mesh profiles, improving performance when working with large data sets, being able to create a COP from the CAD model and many more.  Certainly when it comes to handling complex datum structures, PC-DMIS's geometric tolerance command is way ahead of the competition.

Hey Neil, while on the topic of COP's and CAD models. What is the most efficient way to export the COP data as a .Step or .Iges file? We would like to be able to pull this COP data and give it to engineers so they can overlay it onto the CAD model themselves and see the deviations from their PC.

We have tried to in the past and it took a very long time to open in solidworks, and once it was opened it was just a single dense point, which I imagine was all the COP points. We have tried exporting it as .Step and .IGES with low percentage of points based Uniform Select Cloudpoint operators, and even with too many, nothing would work for us.

we've always exported as XYZ points, iges makes a HUGE file, not fun to work with.

I am trying to, against orders, we have thousands of programs already written for PC-DMIS. Currently I am measuring things with the normal arm program, then adding the COP at the end saved in two different files. The lack of a working mesh license is now keeping my hands tied from pushing back.
And my boss's hatred for anything being scanned with the Demon. 

Does exporting it as XYZ translate well into solidworks for an overlay? I might try that the next time I do a Laser Scan. I didn't think it would be as detailed as exporting the scan as a CAD model.

I think (heavy on 'think') that IGES includes vector information for each point where XYZ does not.  That is the only reason I can come up with for the vast size difference between the files.  Next time, export it as both and let the solidworks people compare them for ease of use and so forth.

Yes, IGES is a horrible format, XYZ is probably the best for point clouds.  For Mesh data I would go with stl.  As for CAD models, if you mean exporting the PC-DMIS .CAD as a different format, then it would have to be STEP because we don't offer an IGES export.  If you mean exporting the features as a CAD model, again, step would probably be the best option.  I'd recommend excluding the COP / Mesh from the feature export though because, as you've found, they will create a huge file that's difficult to work with.  It's much better to handle the features and cop/mesh separately.

What they are wanting is the scan data from the laser so they can create their own heatmap / colormap and see how much overall the part is off from the model in hotspots we may have any issues with. Would XYZ be sufficient for this?

I export my point clouds to XYZ and use them in various other software. Works beautifully.

I export my point clouds to XYZ and use them in various other software. Works beautifully.