REX Anyone?

[design3d]

Does anybody here have experience with the Reverse Engineering Extension in Wildfire 2.0/3.0? Just out of curiosity I requested a quote on it and when I got it I was glad I was sitting in a chair with arms otherwise I would have fallen over. It costs as much as a compact car, at least the quoted price (just under $15,000 USD.) My question is if one was doing a lot of 3D scanning and reverse engineering would that be a justifiable cost? I don't want to turn this into a Solidworks vs. Wildfire topic but I see Solidworks 2007 Premium ($7995)can capture 3D scans and make surfaces/solids out of them, and you can combine that with the new Next Engine scanner for $2495.00 and have a total system for less that just the REX add on. I don't know the comparison of the capabilities of each program, but is there something I am missing with the REX's capabilities? Thanks in advance!

 

[dojo]

No usefull info on the module itself but 2 cents :


As like you we investigated for the license but decided it's much cheaper to outsource to specialised companies who just send out a surface of a scanned product. And then you'll have pro's magnificient capabilities of surfacing to add and finalise ot reconstruct whatever was scanned (unlike what you'll have in solidworks)


Regards,


nick

 

[design-engine]

I did a talk at a PTCUSER conference way back on useing ISDX instead of
REX. The trick is getting from point data to surfaces so you can
create solids. The data is so raw that it needs to be minimized.




My faverite question to seating designers that scan clay is which side
do you want. They all look at me funny not realizeing that the
left side of their clay model is not symetric to the right
side. Once you determine which side you want from the scan
then remove those points from the equations.



I have played with the REX and it is basicly the GeoMagic with a wildfire interface. I prefer to use ISDX and Pro/SURFACE.





My 2 cents









Edited by: design-engine

 

[Brian_Adkins]

I took a 2-day Geomagic class here in NC back in 2000. I was a pretty cool piece of software, but I've not dabbled at all in the REX which incorporates some of Geomagic I'm told.

 

[dojo]

Depending on the subcontrator for scanning they are usually able to turn out a surface these days instead of just a point cloud (most laser scan software anyway). For high quality A side surface modelling I would not thrust the import surfaces anayway and reconstruct them with ISDX


Nick

 

[MetalMan]

You just missed the end of the quarter special were they were offering REX at 50% off. Offer ended @ the end of June. I have Geomagic and I have demoed the REX (Your sales rep should be able to get you a 30 day demo license for you to try) The Geomagic software makes a lot of assumptions when generating the surface model and there are several iterations you must go thru to get to a surface model eg, point cloud, polygons, polygon patch, and then nurbs and we have had little success with getting what we want from the software because the parts we are scanning are castings they very seldom have well defined geometry. Rex is more hands on where you generate curves thru the points from the scan and then define the surface between the curves similar to normal surface modeling. I have yet to be able to justify the added cost of REX even at 50% but I have the problem of already owning Geomagic.

 

[design-engine]

I am not so sure I like the surfaces generated from Restyle. Takes
getting used too. Is the general rule to rebuilding those
things? It is good for the quick and dirty. Race car seats
bones and ergo forms.



By the way I will be speaking at the Pro/USERS conference tommorrow
(FRIDAY) in San Diego. Someone come over and say hi!
[url]http://www.design-engine.com/events/pro_e_conference/index.h tml[/url]



Edited by: design-engine

 

[SW]

I've used REX with some success by for a clay model of a computer mouse
by using an automatic surface fit, then creating cross-sections from
this using and creating the final surface using Style. We've got the
example on our website:



http://www.worthingtonsharpe.com/ServicesReverseTemp.htm



REX is quite powerful, but we wanted to alter the final surface
parametrically so found it was best just using the original surface for
guidance. Solidworks is probably fine for this example, but I'm not
sure how well it copes with more complex reverse engineering techniques
like fitting edges and prismatic shapes to scanned data.



Sam