CAD Design of Eyeglass Frames and Lenses with RapidForm
      Tecnol, one of the world's largest producers of eyeglass frames and lenses, reduced their CAD design time from 3+ days to just a few hours using RapidForm.

Tecnol's design studios around the world create new eyeglass fashions, and hand make each
pair. These prototypes are reviewed, and those selected for production were reverse
engineered into CAD models through a time-consuming process of caliper measurement and
redesign in CAD. The results were not always accurate to the original design intent, and each
pair of glasses took several days to reverse engineer.

Now, using a 3D laser scanner and RapidForm, Tecnol engineers go from a one-off prototype
to a complete, accurate and high quality CAD model in just a few hours. With more than 300
new eyeglass designs released each season, Tecnol is saving more than 20,000 labor hours
per year!

The process in RapidForm
After scanning of the hand-made prototype from 4 directions, the point clouds are brought into RapidForm, cleaned up, and triangulated to create polygon meshes.




Using RapidForm's PTB certified geometry fitting algorithms, the scans are aligned to
one another.



All 4 scans are then merged together. RapidForm automatically removes redundant data and
creates a single high quality polygon mesh of the sunglasses frame.



RapidForm automatically calculates a mirror plane, and the part is mirrored to make a
complete symmetrical model.



Using RapidForm's autosurfacing technology, the polygon mesh is then automatically
fitted with NURBS surfaces in less than 2 minutes.



The NURBS surfaces are checked for accuracy by comparing them to the original polygon
mesh. 99% of the surface area is within 0.015mm of the original mesh data.