Since the introduction of 3D scanning technology, there has always been a need to process it in some capacity. There has also been a need to provide formats to bridge multiple platforms, getting data to travel through the lifecycle of the process. From conception, to digital form via 3D scanning, to a useable file for additive or subtractive manufacturing. For a while these steps have required a multitude of software to capture, manipulate, tesselate meshes, simplify surfaces and generate worthy CAD data for manufacturing. Back in the late '90s a scanning process may have taken a day or longer in its native software to capture 3D geometry. That data was then exported to a mesh processing software, where data is tessellated, edited (cleaning noisy data), a NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) model may be created, exported to a native CAD package like Solidworks, or Pro-E. Since most CAD packages at the time did not like large mesh sets, this was the smoothest path.
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