Editor's Pick: Geomagic Studio 10x Creates Digital Models from Real Objects

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Scanning in data of real-world objects is a vital part of design, industrial, and mechanical engineering. It also plays a vital role in anthropology, medical and dental care, as well as scientific pursuits as varied as historical artifact reproduction and safety inspections of space, air, undersea, and land vehicles. The key to all these endeavors is manipulating your scanned data for some useful goal, and Geomagic is a key developer of software that makes scanned data CAD- and solution-ready for your needs. So, it is "sit up and take notice news" when Geomagic introduces a new version of its suite of software.

Geomagic recently announced Geomagic Studio 10x, the latest version of its suite of digital shape sampling and processing applications. In particular, the company made some big changes in its Fashion Edition, the surface manipulation powerhouse. Fashion Edition gives you the ability to extract design intent from scanned models and then create CAD-ready, surfaced models in several file formats including STL, STEP, OBJ, IGES, DXF, and 3DS. Automatically, by the way.

Geomagic says that Fashion Edition is faster than before. It also added new surface extension and trimming capabilities that create sharp edges between neighboring surfaces. This makes edges and surfaces faster and easier to manipulate in your CAD system. You can automatically or manually classify surface types, choose the number of surfaces to process, and create a single, stitched surface that blends planar, cylindrical, conical, extruded, revolved, and freeform surfaces. In short, Studio Fashion Edition gives you the tools to bring in scanned 3D data and make it ready for your modeling.

Geomagic also spent a lot of development effort on improvements to the entire Studio suite such as better performance and quality of point and polygon processing, an enhanced registration algorithms for helping create more accurate point clouds, and a new decimation methodology that produces smaller but accurate polygon models.

Geomagic Studio is also available in a Shape Edition. Shape Edition lets you create 3D replicas of scanned organic objects and freeform shapes, so it's of particular interest to those scanning for scientific and medical applications. It has features like one-button creation of watertight NURB surfaces. A third version, Geomagic Studio 10x Complete offers all the features of the Fashion and Shape editions.

You can read all about Geomagic Studio 10x in today's Pick of the Week write-up. But your best approach is to hit the link at the bottom of the write-up, sign up for the free trial edition, and take it for a spin. You'll get why Geomagic is considered a leader in its field pretty easily.

Thanks, pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop EngineeringMagazine