Alignment

When you acquire more than one object from the scanner they will be in different positions. To correctly work with the scanner data you need to bring all the Acquisition to the same position reference.

For this you first need to identify an Acquisition that will be used as a reference for all the others. In the Structured Projects this is done automatically by the software.

Then every time you acquire a new information you need to align the new data to the Reference Acquisition or to another acquisition already aligned at the rest of the project

Every acquired information will have a specific Reference Acquisition. The Project Tree will show this relation, every child will be aligned to his parent node in the tree.

Direct Alignment

OpticalRevEng Dental can align the Acquisitions for you. You just need to:

1. Select from the Project Tree the element you want to align to the rest of the project
2. Click the Alignment Button in the Main Toolbar

The software will select the most appropriate reference item, analyze the selcted acquisition and the reference item, and try to identify the correct position of the selected item inside the reference item.
If no alignment can be identified by the software then a Manual Alignment will start.

Manual Alignment

The manual alignment is started every time the software can not complete a Direct Alignment or if you keep down the SHIFT button when you click the Alignment Button in the Main Toolbar

Interface

During the manual alignment the interface will change.

You can see 4 different zones of this screen:

• On the top left you can see the reference object that give you the position reference for all the proejct data
• On the top right you can see the moving object that we want to move from his currant position to bring it in the same reference of all the other project data
• On the bottom you can see both the objects togheter to check the current positions of the moving object
• On the bottom right you have some options and a Numeric Report

Procedure

What you have to do now is:

1. Rotate both the reference object and the moving object in a way that you can see some common part between the two object from the same point of view
2. Click on the same point on both the objects
3. Check on the bottom 3D view that the position is more or less correct (It's not needed to be in the perfect position now)
4. Click the Best Fit button on the right

If the two object have enough common points the software will find the best alignment between the two. You can check this alignment visually on the bottom 3D View or reading the values in the Numeric Report.

If the alignment is good you can click Ok to confirm the new position of the moving object.

If the alignment is not good enough you can click the Reset button and start the alignment again.

Options

There are two options availables during the manual aligment:

1. Fine Alignment : When you click Best Fit the software will try to move the moving object up to 1mm to find a bettere alignment. This can create problems if the common part between the two objects is really small. With Fine Aligment enabled the software will move the moving object not more than 0.1mm
2. Ignore Normals : The objects have an inside and an outside. When the software search for an alignment it refuse to align the inside of one object with the outouside of the other. If you want to ignore the differences between inside and outside you can check the Ingore Normals option

Now that you know how to align an object to the rest of the project you can return to the Main Page or continue to the Mesh Generation page