Reverse engineering has always been a hot research topic in the universities. Stanford university gave birth to a product called Paraform (financially backed by paul allen). In 1999 and 2000 there was a lot of noise about this company. But they burned all the cash(abt $70 million) and had to close the doors.
Reverse engineering is the process of generating a digital model from its physical counterpart. First, the real physical part is scanned (using a digitizer or any kind of scanner) to obtain a usually dense point cloud. There are sophisticated algorithms that take an arbitrary point cloud and convert it into a digital model. There are various representations of a model. It can be a polygonal mesh or a set of nurbs surfaces (stitched together) or some other mathematical representation (subdivision surfaces, implicit reps are also popular).
Daz3D, a salt lake city, Utah based company has purchased the Bryce division from the troubled Corel. Corel had originally acquired Bryce from Metacreations. Metacreations sold many of their 3D graphics products three years ago to different companies and moved to NewYork to start their online 3D product called viewPoint. Bryce is a good and affordable ($100) 3D product that is good for landscaping or terrain modeling.
