3D scanner to Solidworks

I’m an engineer/tinkerer with a Solidworks licence, I recently bought a Shining/Einstar 3D scanner for reverse engineering/prototyping my own stuff at home with the company laptop& licence.

Now I did as much homework as I could and I realised that the YouTube influencers had been gifted their scanners and they all glossed over the part where you cross over from the 3d scanned STL world to parasolid CAD modelling/3D printing parts.

Solidworks does have the ability to import STL / meshes but due to the size of the mesh models and the polygon counts it gets clunky/time consuming.

I’m not wanting to do much with the mesh models other than create new parts in Solidworks to align/mate alongside them.

Is there any easy way to convert STL to STP that’s ideally free / low cost?

Thanks in advance!

lol, this was mentioned by myself & others on the previous thread!!

Basically no. Does Solidworks offer a (paid) reverse-engineering plugin? I know Rhino does although it’s ££££. I use the paid version of Fusion which can do it although falls over when things get even slightly complicated IME. It’s by far the cheapest reverse-engineering tool I’m aware of though, but only really useful for turning STP exported to STL back into STP.

Your best bet is probably to just use the mesh as a template and re-draw the design over it.

How are you finding the scanner though? Did you go for the ~£1k one you mentioned before?

Yes it’s the ~£1k scanner (work bought it). It’s okay – it needs a textured surface for best results, shiny smooth gloss confuses it.

It is as I expected the equivalent of early 3d printers in that it would be clunky and need a few work arounds. It’s certainly not at the plug and play / scan and direct to 3d print stage.

All the influencers briefly mention Fusion but without going into detail.
I have a fairly high spec level of Solidworks (but can’t remember which one), it does convert mesh to parasolid but as mentioned takes ages.
You can easily import the mesh as an object but it’s not a parasolid and is difficult to design parts against using ‘move with Triad’ to try and align.

it needs a textured surface for best results, shiny smooth gloss confuses it.

yeah, same with my much older scanner. I got good results from a shoe spray for athletes foot (!) that leaves a white powder residue, although it’s messy and cleaning up the object after a bit of a pain. Eventually caved and bought a proper scanning spray (Aesub) which is expensive but brilliant, evaporates away to nothing after a while!

You can easily import the mesh as an object but it’s not a parasolid and is difficult to design parts

yeah. not actually tried myself but I would probably just free-hand draw over the top using the mesh as a reference. (Exactly how I’d re-trace a bitmap into a vector graphic, only in 3d!) Depends how accurate you need to be I guess.

Generally I find it far quicker to just measure & redraw something rather than 3d scan (the things I tend to do are not massively complicated though)

Lots of people forget about that fairly crucial step.

Geomagic Design X is the extremely effective and brutally expensive answer, so not really for home use. Even that often boils down to ‘*very* good tools to let you trace over a mesh’.

In the event I was trying to recreate the workflow at home I’d probably start with cloud compare and something like the following process:

– Align and merge meshes if scanned in sections

– Clean up

– Extract cross sections in relevant axes

– export cross sections as something you can open in cad (dxf?)

-trace over into cad sketches.

I haven’t actually followed that process all the way through but it’s as good as i can come up with off the top of my head.

You can also jump the nurbs bit of the process entirely and stay in mesh if you’re only interested in 3d printing. Takes a bit of practice and you have to wire your brain up very differently to CAD but you can do a lot in blender.

When I was using solid works and being sent stp files frequently I would often run them through Fusion 360 and onshape to try and get them to play nicely, sometimes it worked like a charm, others it didn’t.

I’m now using Inventor and it’s a dream compared to SW, seems to run far better though I’m not doing like for like work so that could be some of it.

“export cross sections as something you can open in cad (dxf?)”

The supplied Einstar software will only really export as STL.

You can measure with the Einstar software but it’s limited and doesn’t understand it’s a 3d object so measurements are only a single plane.

“export cross sections as something you can open in cad (dxf?)”

The supplied Einstar software will only really export as STL.

in Fusion you can use the Inspect>Section Analysis tool to quickly view the cross-section of a solid or mesh (so no need to manually convert to DXF etc first), I assume SW has something similar?

Yeah, that export step was the last prt of going through cloud compare (open source), not in the scanner native software.

If you can get a functional section view in solidworks as zilog says that may be quicker

I’ll have another look in SW mesh tools in Monday (I forgot to bring laptop home).

I did scan a toy car and it took overnight to convert from a mesh to parasolid and that’s with a £3k mega graphics card/ram/processor spec laptop. I was just wondering if there was something that would magically convert the mesh to a simple solid object rather than millions of polygons

Often not effectively – they’re at some level really quite different types of data, both in terms of how 3d shape is held and, say, being parametric or not. The ‘magic button’ sadly doesn’t reliably exist. It can work, for the right shape, but in my experience if you care about the result you’re working out what the actual parts of the shape are yourself. There are however excellent tools to assist with e.g. ‘i believe this area is a swept/lofted/revolved feature, work out the base construction sketches and axes for me’.

You can tidy up / mend the mesh in Meshmixer if required (but get it quick because Autodesk are retiring it).

You can then load the mesh into Blender  and use its tools to reduce the polygon count to something that the CAD can cope with (less than ~10,000 for F360, I believe.)

Basically following the steps from about 7:56 in this video:

(I’m no expert though – I’ve done it precisely once, but it worked!)

(Beware that the learning curve for Blender is overhanging if you stray from the instructions.)

@tillydog

Thanks for the info re Meshmixer, the fact it’s part of Fusion and the influencers are all using 360 allbeit skirting quickly over that stage is promising. I’ll download it Monday when back at work👍

From my experience, Fusion *Really*  doesn’t like high number polygon meshes – Even a 10k polygon mesh takes Fusion 5-10  minutes to swallow. I’d stick it through Blender first.