Convert STL from 3D scanner to solid

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone. My company is considering of buying a 3D scanner. We received a sample from the seller for us to try to work with our existing software (Inventor 2018). I wish to make the part more interactable (e.g. with holes and flat surfaces), so that we can either mount it or hold it by using constraint. Is there any way to make this item so?

I have tried to work with Mesh Enabler, but no luck so far.

[imajar]

You wont be able to scan something in and have it magically convert to perfect geometry.  The mesh enabler can convert mesh to surfaces or solids (if mesh is watertight).  But the surface will retain the imperfect triangulated surface geometry inherited from the mesh.

The "Fit Mesh Face" tool can do a best fit primitive surface features such as planes, cylinders, etc.  So, you could extract a few primitives and use those to mate against.  For holes in the sample part, I think the best you can do is make a best fit plane and sketch a best fit circle yourself.  

You can constrain directly to mesh faces, and I've noticed that inventor does some behind the scenes magic to try and recognize flat surfaces and circles when constraining, but I don't think it will work as well on scanned data since it is somewhat noisy.

Fusion 360, 3DS, and mesh mixer are all autodesk software that have a few mesh tools to help preprocess a mesh file (if you scanner software doesnt already).  For example, you could decimate the mesh in any of those softwares to drastically reduce the triangle count.  Generally, I have found that fusion 360 does a better job of converting watertight meshes to solids.

[WHolzwarth]

Here's a basic attempt.

After reducing the number of meshes I've thickened the scan in Meshmixer.

STL and 2018 IPT attached