COPious

		Additional Information
CAMcad Technologies, Inc. is pleased to announce Cloud Of Points (COPious), a powerful, easy to use add-in for SURFCAM® designed to simplify manipulation of complex CAD model data for manufacturing. Affordably priced well beneath any competitive systems on the market, and totally integrated within the SURFCAM environment, this software is a MUST for anyone dealing routinely with any form of copious data.		COPious Getting Started COPious Installation Guide COPious Security

• Major Features
  Automatic Surface Creation from Point Cloud Data.
  Laser scanners or mechanical digitizers can generate thousands of 3D points per second from a physical model, yet few traditional CAD or CAM systems have effective tools for manipulating this data. COPious automatically converts this data into well organized surface models, even when there’s overlapping data points or the data is randomly organized.
• Smoothing Algorithms
  A simple yet powerful smoothing algorithm automatically “sandpapers” the rough spots off the data prior to deploying SURFCAM’s powerful NURB surface smoothing algorithms. The user interface consists of an XY grid size, a slider bar for “as is” vs. “moderate” vs. “extensive” smoothing. Once this task is completed the user is presented with options for how many points per segment are to be considered for each blended surface point as the NURB surface is created.
• Automatic Blending Over Cutouts
  A typical laser scanner captures all details within a “depth of field”, omitting points that are outside of user-specified settings. This leaves “holes” in the point cloud data that normally must be manually fitted using tedious geometric construction techniques. COPious automatically handles this by interpolating intermediate points at each grid location, then the adjacent surface shape influences these grid points to make the “holes” simply “disappear. This is often the most difficult task when manually working with point cloud data.
• Atomatic Healing of Surface Models
  Many solid modeler IGES translators deliberately overlap adjacent surfaces, trimming them back along a common edge. Standard CAD or CAM-based surface algorithms have no provision for dealing with this circumstance. Also, since what should be a smooth surface is expressed with individual surface patches, the UV flow of these surfaces do not necessarily transition smoothly from surface to surface. Since COPious can easily handle overlapping point data, raw CAD data files generated by solid modelers can easily be converted into a single “baby smooth” surface with little/no user intervention.
• Automatic Probe Radius Compensation
  Provision has been made to offset all data prior to surface generation, resulting in wrinkle-free true surface data based upon either probe tip and radius or probe center and radius.
• Construction View Support
  COPious works in the active Construction View within SURFCAM. When combined with a little creativeness and SURFCAM’s powerful surface trimming facilities, this allows a skilled operator to quickly create fully-contained 3D models.
• Inputs
  ASCII Point Cloud Files
  In FilesOpen mode, COPious contains a high performance external reader for importing thousands of points per second for surface processing. COPious buffers all point data into a temporary file for processing and doesn’t multiply to amount of data by adding this information to your SURFCAM model unless requested.
• Any SURFCAM Input Methods
  When COPious is activated from the SURFCAM AddIns menu, any valid POINT or PolyLine data that is unmasked and selectable will be considered for the surface to be created. PolyLines are automatically subdivided into POINT entities at each grid location.
• System Software Requirements
  COPious runs as an AddIn to SURFCAM 2000 or later systems and requires the SURFCAM surface modeler.
• Hardware Requirements
  Minimum: Any system that will run Windows 2000 or higher.
  
  Recommended: Obviously “more is better”, but Pentium II and above systems with 128Mbytes of RAM operating at 300MHz or higher will perform surprisingly well. A suite of test results performed on a Dell Inspiron 7500 Pentium III with 256Mbytes of RAM are attached.
  
  COPious is copy protected with a hardware lock (SIM) that has been tested to work with a variety of SURFCAM configurations on all supported Operating Systems. An automatic Help file and a suite of sample point cloud data sets with resultant DSN files is included on the distribution CD.