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Engineers can now reverse-engineer 3D models

A system that uses a technique called constructive solid geometry (CSG) is allowing MIT researchers to deconstruct objects and turn them into 3D models, thereby allowing them to reverse-engineer complex things.

The system appeared in a paper entitled "InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees" by Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, and Wojciech Matusik.

"At a high level, the problem is reverse engineering a triangle mesh into a simple tree. Ideally, if you want to customize an object, it would be best to have access to the original shapes — what their dimensions are and how they're combined. But once you combine everything into a triangle mesh, you have nothing but a list of triangles to work with, and that information is lost," said Tao Du to 3DPrintingIndustry. "Once we recover the metadata, it's easier for other people to modify designs."

Original Submission