From the course: 3D Scanning: From Mesh to Model

What is reverse engineering? - Fusion 360 Tutorial

From the course: 3D Scanning: From Mesh to Model

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What is reverse engineering?

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- And specifically, what is reverse engineering? Reverse engineering is taking mechanical or sometimes a little bit more organic shapes out in the physical world, scanning those and then recreating those as accurately as possible in a 3D modeling software. A lot of times you hear about reverse engineering for more mechanical shapes, things that are angular, with screw bosses, with edges, with ellipse, all sorts of things like that that I'm showing on my screen. Reverse engineering is the recreation of these very fine features for other purposes. Whether you want to recreate that actual thing in case something that you have is broken and you want to make it again, to defining and figuring out draft angles of a product to figure out how to actually manufacture a product that you have, or taking very accurate measurements so that you can create complementary products to ones that are in the real world. What this means is you want to have as accurate a scan as possible, in order to do the reverse engineering. Now that is a loaded term because an accurate scan is necessarily performed or created, by a more expensive scanning process. This class will show you how to approach, reverse engineering with 3D scans, and how to get good enough scans, with some techniques that are available in the lower cost realm, so that if you ever do get a scan from a more professional company or you get a better scanner yourself, you'll know how to approach those products and projects a little bit more fluidly, rather than just starting off with an expensive scan that you don't know how to use. So this section has descriptions of some case studies, on how you can approach 3D scanning, I invite you to look at them, and think about the world around you and the geometry around you and how you might use it for reverse engineering yourself.

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