Gary,
We use a 3D Scanner every single day and work with the data inside Creo 2.0
First, let me say up front, that you need the Reverse Engineering Extension in order to import point cloud data into Creo Parametric for you to work with. We have REX but it's not supported very well by PTC and they have not made any changes to it in years. For this reason, we are going to purchase Geomagic Studio to procee our scan data in the future.
This software is not cheap and will run you about $16K
What we do is process the point cloud data in the 3D Scanner software and clean it up at that stage. We then take the clean data and export it as a point cloud (.pt) file and import into Creo Parametric with REX. You can then create a mesh surface from the point cloud data. What you do with it from here depends on your goals. If you are simply wanting to overlay it to a 3D model to check accuracy, you will need some kind of verfication software. We use Geomagic Control to very this type of data and generate reports for Engineering and QA. If you want to reverse engineer the scanned data into a working parametric model, you will need to do a lot more work. In order to reverse engineer this data into a working model, you will need to use it as a 3D template to build your features from. This is not as hard as it sounds, but it does take much longer than just analysing the data for accuracy.
Geomagic Studio is able to take some of the scan data and create geometry that is recognized by CAD software, but since we don't have the software yet, we have not tried it. I would imagine that Geomagic Studio will have a challenge in creating featuers of organic surfaces which our products use heavily.
We have been using 3D Scanners for about 9 years now, so let me know if you have any other questions.
Here is a story about us and our 3D scanning.
http://nvision3d.com/success-stories/nvision-hensley.html
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
