3D & Visualisation

3D and visualisation here cover two worlds: creating geometry for appearance rather than manufacture, and processing models captured from reality.

Alongside visualisation — presentation-quality rendering, animation, materials and lighting — are tools for working with point clouds and triangle meshes: cleaning a scan, filling holes, registering scans to each other, and comparing as-designed against as-built. On existing-building projects this becomes central.

One distinction worth keeping: a tool in this category produces a shape that looks right, not necessarily a part that can be manufactured to dimension. For precise mechanical design you need a parametric modeller from the CAD category.