CONVERTING 3D POINT CLOUDS TO PLANAR SHAPED SOLIDS.

3D point clouds can be easily turned to meshed surfaces or solids, but still they have to be processed to be useable as 3D models for Reverse Engineering. A main drawback of such a conversion is that the file the part is saved to is very big, even if the shape is in fact a simple one. Finding in the point cloud planar shapes, which could be converted to primitives, is very useful. The paper presents an algorithm and some pieces of software designed in VisualLISP for AutoCAD that aid user in converting point clouds in solid primitives if the original shape of the part allows that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]