Hello @Anonymous,
Scan data is used quiet often in Inventor; from land survey scans to industrial piping layouts to individual parts for reverse engineering. Parts that are related but not needed for an assembly are often scanned and placed to show relationships, etc. for presentations, etc. Note that scan data does not show up in drawings and currently there are no good "scan to model" options if you are thinking you can just scan it, then convert it to a 3D model. There are a lot of passable Scan to Surface or Scan to Shape 3rd party programs/plug-ins; but from my research and experience even these will require a lot of clean-up and model rework/corrections before you can use them.
Unfortunately Inventor dropped the ability to pull scan data straight in (after 2013, I think); you now have to go thru ReCap to convert the data into something Inventor can import. As posted above, ReCap has several sample files you can look at.
What it actually looks like depends on your settings - you can use the photo feature of your scanner to place the correct color on the point cloud, or you can use the default intensity setting (the closer to the scanner the color changes to give a gradient color affect), etc. Also there are options for all black, etc.
Once in Inventor, the point cloud acts much like a part - but with limited editing abilities. So you can place your scan in an assembly to see the parts in place, or you can derive parts into the scan, etc. The settings allow you to set how many points you can see, how large the points are, etc. So the look of a single point cloud can vary drastically based upon user preferences or intent of the data.
I suggest, as suggested above, that you explore ReCap since it will go hand-in-hand with your Inventor scanning.
Hope this helps,
Kenny
