Bring every scan into one frame.

Photograph an object all the way round, or film it, and Photogrammetry works out where every camera stood, then reconstructs the surface in detail as a coloured point cloud. Give it its true size, align it and fuse it like any other scan.

• Photographs (JPEG, PNG or TIFF, three or more) or a video (MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV or M4V), with frames taken at the rate you set.
• A plain backdrop is masked out of every photo, so only the object is reconstructed.
• Fast detail mode runs about three times quicker than Standard.
• A second, cleaner pass removes points the photos disagree on, and the cloud is stood upright for you.
• Finished stages are kept, so a stopped solve carries on where it left off.

• NeedsAn NVIDIA graphics card (CUDA)
• You getA coloured point cloud

Scanners leave points floating off the surface, specks, doubled layers where passes overlap, and fuzz. Auto Clean finds them, shows everything it found in bright red, and deletes it in one step once you've checked.

• Four checks: stray points, isolated specks, overlapping points thinned back to one layer, and surface noise.
• Each area is judged by its own point spacing, so the parts of a scan taken from further away are kept.
• Add to what it found, or take some away, with the selection tools before you delete.

• UndoOne step. Your original file is never changed.

Mesh to Cloud samples a mesh into a point cloud, each point carrying the mesh's normal and colour: one point on every vertex, a half, a quarter, a tenth, one every so many millimetres, or a set number. The same mesh and choice always give the same cloud.

Flip Normals turns a cloud's normals round, the whole cloud or just the points you select, for a cloud that lights from the wrong side or would fuse inside out. Reduce thins a heavy scan evenly before you align it; it is the same tool as on the Mesh tab.

Drag the arrows to slide a scan and the rings to turn it, or type exact distances and angles. You can also aim it: towards a point, from one point to another, or along an edge, an axis or a face's normal. Nothing is kept until you press Apply, and then the move is one Undo step.

• The arrows stay square to the world, or turn with the scan so you slide it along its own sides.
• Scans grouped to move together follow it.

Auto Align compares the scans' shapes to find where they overlap, even when they start far apart or turned round, and brings each one onto the fixed scans. Before anything moves, a summary says how many matches were accepted, rejected or uncertain, and how well they close up. A scan with no confident match stays where it was.

The view splits in two: the fixed scans on one side, the scans to align on the other, and both together below. Click the same spot on each, three times or more, and the scans are brought together as one rigid piece. A table shows how far apart each pair lands after the fit, so a mis-pick stands out, and any pair can be deleted or picked again.

• Tick one box to refine the result with Fine Align straight away.
• Aligned scans become the reference for the next one, and the point numbering carries on.

For scans that are already close, Fine Align refines each one against every fixed scan, within the most it may travel and turn. A move that would make the fit worse, or break a limit, is not taken. It can also align the scans to your Design solid, or move a Design solid onto a scan and record the move in the model's history.

• Fast, Balanced or High accuracy.
• Limits on movement (100 mm to start) and rotation (5°), tightened for scans already in place.

Set the part square before you surface it or draw from it. Measure a plane for the main axis; a line, a cylinder's axis or a second plane for the rotation; and a point for the origin. Every scan then turns and moves onto the world axes, as one step.

• Planes picked on the part or fitted to a selection, or symmetry planes found from a line drawn across it.
• The origin at a picked point, the start of the line, or where a cylinder's axis meets the plane.
• Start from Plane and line, Plane, line, point, or Three planes, and change any step.

Even well-aligned scans disagree slightly where they overlap: a scan warped a little, or two passes a fraction apart. Smooth Overlap bends each chosen scan onto a master scan there, never further than the limit you set (0.5 mm to start), and fades the bend out beyond the overlap. Scans further apart than the limit, such as the two sides of sheet metal, are left alone.

Fuse turns aligned scans and clouds into one mesh. Leave it on Auto and it checks the scans' quality and overlap, then chooses how: join them exactly, rebuild one surface through all the data, or a mix of the two.

• Keep the openings the scan really has, make a watertight outer skin, or keep both sides of a thin panel.
• Detail set to the measured point spacing, or to a size you choose.
• Colour carried from every scan and blended across the overlap, with exposure and white balance evened out first.
• Stray pieces removed, gaps filled up to a size you set, and likely design holes, round, square or slotted, left open.
• The toothed fringe at a scan's edge tidied, trimmed to a clean line, or left exactly as scanned.
• The result measured against every source point, if you ask, with its fit error and coverage.

• MemoryA budget you set for the job
• UndoOne step; the sources are hidden, not deleted

Where one scan has a dent, a ragged hole edge or noise, and another covers that area better, Patch replaces the base wherever the better scan lies over it, stitches it in and fairs the seam. The patch's rim is bent onto the base so the seam has no step, while its middle never moves. Surface facing the other way, like the far side of a thin panel, is never replaced.

Subtract cuts one scan with another. Two closed scans give a closed body with a cut wall, and every triangle away from the cut is kept exactly. Join puts meshes into one body exactly as they are. Average scan moves each point of a reference scan to the equal-weight middle of all the scans there, so a denser scanner can't dominate the result.

• You getA new body; the sources are kept, hidden