Importing CMM data into SolidWorks

[Fisher]

I'm looking to use a CMM machine to scan a scale model of a GT car.

Does anyone know a simple means by which to import this into SW?

I hope to make alterations to the vehicle in SW and calculate the changes in CoP and downforce.

Has anyone tried this??

There is a useful article in Racecar Engineering on the subject but I am hoping I can use packages which do not require the same level of pre-processing before the uniform mesh is created.

Is this possible?

[MechaniX_034]

What do you mean by CMM? Being in Oz I'm not too familiar with the term, but if you mean 3D scanning all you'd need to do is make sure that you specify the output file type as either IGES. or STL. both of which SW can open. Simply save the scanned file, and open it in SW.

However, you may need to scale the model to 1:1 in order to get as accurate a representation as possible. You'd be able to do that in the SW environment if your version is 2006 or above, simply find a referance dimension and expand as necessary(you'd need to specify that the scanning resolution be quite high but) I hope that you have ample RAM and CPU cooling.

[jimimonet]

I do a lot of Laser scanning and Solidworks 2008 has a scan to cad feature.