Pick of the Week: Control Scanned 3D Data with HIPP

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

If you have anything to do with scanning for reverse engineering, measurement, and inspection you undoubtedly know ReverseEngineering.com by its old corporate name, HighRES. The company still uses HighRES as a brand for its line of software toolsets, and its mission has not changed: Integrating scanning hardware and reverse engineering software with CAD. Only two things have changed with the old HighRES Inc., its name and everything for the better with its new HIPP — HighRES Integrated Point Processor — technology.

ReverseEngineering.com delivers plug-in toolsets — it has something like 500 of them - that integrate your portable and traditional CMMs, laser trackers, and laser scanners with CAD/CAM systems like Autodesk Inventor, KeyCreator, Mastercam, NX, Pro/ENGINEER, Rhino, Solid Edge, and SolidWorks. The cool trick here has been that ReverseEngineering.com is, in many ways, a data translation outfit. HighRES software translates raw digitized data from Faro, MicroScribe, Polhemus, ROMER CimCore, and 3D Creator hardware into native, parametric sketches that your CAD/CAM platform can work with right away. A terrific saver of time and effort. HIPP builds off all that and streamlines your workflow by simplifying point-cloud data management with on-the-fly capabilities.

HIPP is also a stand-alone application, so you can use it to grab scanned data and export it in industry-standard formats for upstream applications quickly. "Quickly" as in while you scan. Which is cool enough right there. But where HIPP really shines is when you couple it with the company's hardware- and software-specific solutions. Then, you can save all sorts of time and work, perhaps even days.

Take HighRES for NX and MicroScribe scanners as an example. First, this coupling eliminates the manual data translation process by taking raw digitized data from MicroScribe and converting it to NX-friendly format as it scans. You can initiate the scan from NX. But, here's the part that caught my eye, HIPP enables you to scan, process data sets, and model from inside of NX platform simultaneously - even dense oversized point clouds. So, you can use HIPP to, say, visually inspect and quickly export point-cloud data sets and begin modeling while still pulling in data.

And, depending upon what level of power you need - coupled or stand-alone — HIPP provides a full suite of reverse engineering, measurement, and inspection tools. Thinning, 3-point alignment, custom planes, point ordering and filtering, applying tolerances, automating common tasks, and so forth. You can even customize your object transformation processes to your best practices. All that is covered in today's Pick of the Week write-up, where you'll also find links to videos and a sign-up for a web demo.

For more than 20 years, ReverseEngineering.com's tools have optimized reverse engineering for your CAD/CAM software. ReverseEngineering.com not only speeds up your data collection to modeling process, its new HIPP software enables you to scan, process, and manage point cloud data as you have never been able to before. HIPP is well worth checking out.

Thanks, Pal. - Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine