I’ve mentioned the NextEngine before (reLink), but one of the issues with scan data is generating “watertight” models. If there’s a gap between a couple of surface patches you can either try to repair it, try to work around it, or toss it altogether. I’ve done all three. You might recall the problems I had trying to repair a bunch of unaligned and mismatched patches on a model I’d ripped from Second Life and ported into Pro/ENGINEER (reLink). Never got back to that. Anyway, Desktop Engineering is reporting news (Link) related to that NextEngine scanner. From the DE site:

At SolidWorks World in New Orleans last week, NextEngine (Santa Monica, CA) introduced RapidWorks, a suite of tools that lets you take raw points from your NextEngine Desktop 3D Scanner and turn them into idealized SolidWorks SLDPRT part files.
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Although the high-end version of RapidformXOR normally costs about $20,000, the RapidWorks product for the NextEngine Scanner is priced at $2,495.
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NextEngine says that its ScanStudio ART is tailored for designers who want to create fully healed watertight models for 3D printing and complex design or CGI tasks.

Between this announcement and the new, sub-$10k desktop printers shipping in a few months, I’m a little stunned. I expected developments this year, but this is exceeding my expectations.