Reverse engineering

Drop an STL, OBJ, PLY, 3MF or glTF file anywhere in HelioCad and it opens in the Reverse Engineer workspace; drop it onto the empty view and the import starts straight away. No scanner? Drop a photo instead. HelioAI builds a textured 3D mesh from the single image in the background, on HelioCad's own hardware, and opens it as the scan when it is done.

The dock follows the workflow: Import, Convert, Refine, Check and Send capsules, each with a matching step. Set the units on import if the file does not carry them.

Convert to Solid recognises prisms, revolves, drafted shapes and hole patterns in the mesh and rebuilds them as real CAD. Choose a strategy: a clean parametric rebuild that returns a sketch-and-feature tree you can edit, or an exact mirror that follows the scan skin and keeps every detail as a multi-body, boolean-editable solid.

Rebuild as parametric goes a step further on scans: it reconstructs an editable feature tree and checks the result against the scan, so the history you get back is one you can trust and change.

Every conversion reports the maximum deviation it actually measured — certified when it is within tolerance, flagged when it is not, never guessed. Overlay view lines the rebuilt solid up with the scan so you can see where the two differ, and the deviation view colours the difference on the model.

When you are satisfied, Send hands the solid to the Model workspace, where it behaves like any other part: measure it, add features, draft a drawing, or program it in Manufacture.