3D Scanning & Machining

[andy_con]

what options are out there for 3d scanning an object and then turning that into some form of gcode for machining?

its a subject I know nothing about but want to get into

[lucan07]

3d scanners are either extremely poor or exremely expensive at this point in time £5000 would get you a result worth machining £500 will get you something with very poor resolution not worth 3d printing let alone machining. A few cheap self builds around that can give results with a webcam and line lasers and get close to the sub £500 scanners, I have an £300 iSense sitting here that was a freebie thats good for displaying on screen with photo mapping but the resolution is so poor that its useless to produce a solid of any sort.

[Neale]

There are also things like 123D Catch, a free online service, that will take a set of photographs of an object, taken from different positions, and turn them into a 3D model that can be given to a CAM programme to produce gcode. It does work, I have used it, but it doesn't work anything like as well or as easily as its documentation implies. Took me days to edit the STL 3D model data to get something usable. But in the end it did work. It's an option, and it might be better now than when I last used it (around a year ago).

[MetalMagus]

Came across the site below a while ago. Might be worth a look.

http://www.david-3d.com/en/products/overview