In this video tech tip. I’m going to show you how to use the Rough Positioning and Precise Positioning tool in Artec Studio. These tools make it easier to reverse engineer parts by moving the scanned mesh to a better, more logical coordinate system.

In the Rough Positioning tools dropdown select which plane you would like to snap the mesh to. In this case, I’ll use XOY (X Origin Y) and click three points. When you click the third point, the mesh is automatically moved to snap to the plane you’ve selected. You can invert if you wish, click apply and the mesh is in that new location. If you turn the scanned data on you will see that the mesh has moved.

Alternatively, you can use Precise Positioning, which depends on having constructed primitives. I’ve already constructed a plane to represent one axis, a plane for the second axis, and a cylinder for the third. The first thing I’m going to do is move the cylinder to the origin and have it represent the Z axis. I can also have plane one represent the origin that will move it to the same space. And I can set plane two to represent Z, that way everything is aligned with the proper coordinate system.

Now that that’s finished, we can go ahead and export that mesh to SOLIDWORKS.