I was playing with my POP2 3D scanner, scanned this toy fish of my kid’s and 3D printed the resulting scan. I had to manually draw the spots on it, but really happy with how it turned out. Pictures don’t do it justice just how exactly the same they are in hand. Not all of the textures came through though.
All I really need is to get the surface data into something other than a “mesh” format. My actual job is working with Catia V5, but my work does not have any of the applicable Catia licenses to directly work with mesh files (such as STLs). If I can get to that point I’m golden. I have plenty of experience working with and creating surfaces.
FreeCad can apparently make a step file from meshes with a few steps, but when I did that with a simple 1 2 3 block scan, the result was about 2.5GB’s, and tends to lock up anything that tries to open it. I may look into an open source program to create usable surfaces from point clouds instead of trying to use meshes.
I have access to CATIA but bloody hell that software is complicated. I’ll stick with Solidworks even if it’s capabilities (at least with surfaces) is lower.
Dealing with converting formats and getting your data where you can manipulate it is needlessly complicated. It isn’t a real CAD program, but consider looking at Blender to at least get the mesh into something more usable. Plus it’s free.
Good luck dude. If these ever drop into the $200 range I’ll definitely pull the trigger on one.