CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
6 December 2007
Product News
Thinkreshape, think3's Extra Something for Reverse Engineering
think3 developed a new solution designed to help import and manage files from the 3D digitalization of physical models in a CAD environment, to operate within prototyping, design review, finished elemental analysis and inspection.
Thinkreshape is the new reverse engineering and deviation control tool suite that allows to rebuild the maths of a physical object.
The optical triangularization technology allows to capture 3D objects of different sizes as 3D digital models consisting in a cloud of triangularized points (mesh). thinkreshape can import one or more meshes quickly, transform them with its point reduction, smoothing, and direct modification (GSM Global Shape Modeling on Meshes) tools and turn them into a single model for quick prototyping, FEA, simulation, animation, control and inspection. The new solution allows to build a model of parametric surfaces ("Brep-Skins") lying directly on the mesh, that can be used in combination with other software products, modified or physically built by means of tooling or quick prototyping machines.
thinkreshape is designed for companies in the automotive, transportation, molds, product design, consumer product and medical industries but, in general, it is recommended whenever it is necessary to start from a physical prototype in wood, resin, etc. made by a modeling engineer or from any real object that has to be reproduced in a 3D computer image to process or change it. In many contexts, such as a few styling sectors and for specific Clay Modeling shapes (creation of a physical model), this is still a very important stage, especially for those who do not have powerful modeling tools such as thinkID's GSM. thinkreshape helps move part of a company's activities to reverse engineering.
That extra something
A many-year cooperation on a reverse engineering project between think3's R&D team and a leading company in the transportation industry is producing an extremely powerful functionality which automatically creates very high quality surfaces. This functionality, starting from border curves, generates high quality surfaces "lying" on the reference mesh. The main differentiating element of this tool, compared to other existing reverse engineering solutions, lies in the fact that it produces trimmed surfaces, which means that the visible part is defined by the border curves determining the required domain, whereas the basic surface is four sided, it is therefore more manageable than triangular ones. With this feature, not only do users produce high quality surfaces in a short time, but the resulting model is not different from the one a modeling expert would create manually in a longer time
Benefits
thinkreshape delivers immediate benefits: reduced capturing/reconstruction time, reduced manual adjustments of surfaces, and it is more consistent with the digitalized shape in case of high quality digitalization. But the main benefit emerges when thinkreshape's output is implemented in thinkdesign suite's CAD environment and thinkPLM suite's data management. The integration with thinkID, thinkdesign, thinktooling and thinkPLM provides a wide range of tools from the consolidated think3 solution: modeling functionalities, GSM, assemblies, rendering, 2D tables and PLM for a comprehensive lifecycle management of reverse engineering information.
thinkreshape 1.0 will be officially released with thinkdesign 2008.1.
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