A Review on Shape Engineering and Design Parameterization in Reverse Engineering

On the other hand, shape engineering and design parameterization aims at creating fully parametric solid models from scanned data points and exporting them into mainstream www.intechopen.comReverse Engineering -Recent Advances and Applications 162 CAD packages that support part re-engineering, feature-based NC toolpath generations, and technical data package preparation.Although, converting data points into NURB surface models has been automated, creating parametric solid models from data points cannot and will not be fully automated.This is because that, despite technical challenges in implementation, the original design intent embedded in the data points must be recovered and realized in the parametric solid model.Modeling decisions have to be made by the designer in order to recover the original design intents.However, designers must be relieved from dealing with tedious point data manipulations and primitive geometric entity constructions.Therefore, the ideal scenario is having software tools that take care of labor intensive tasks, such as managing point cloud, triangulation, etc., in an automated fashion; and offer adequate capabilities to allow designers to interactively recover design intents.Such an ideal scenario has been investigated for many years.After these many years, what can be done with the technology and tools developed at this point?Many technical articles already address auto surfacing.In this chapter, in addition to auto surfacing, we will focus on solid modeling and design parameterization.We will present a brief review and technical advancement in 3D shape engineering and design parameterization for reverse engineering, in which discrete point clouds are converted into feature-based parametric solid models.Numerous efforts have been devoted to developing technology that automatically creates NURB surface models from point clouds.Only very recently, the development was extended to support parametric solid modeling that allows significant expansion on the scope of engineering assignments.In this chapter, underlying technology that enables such advancement in 3D shape engineering and design parameterization is presented.Major commercial software that offers such capabilities is evaluated using practical examples.Observations are presented to conclude this study.Next, we will present a more precise discussion on design parameterization to set the tone for later discussion in this chapter.www.intechopen.