Reverse Engineering Furniture with an Artec 3D Scanner

A furniture manufacturer outsources 3D scanning to Artec to boost productivity, save time and cut costs.

MU Form Furniture Design is an Oakland-based company that designs, manufactures and distributes furniture products for the modern home and business. The company is never short of orders, since good and original design is sought after by architects and interior designers.

The main material MU Form works with is high quality bent ply, which is one of the most widely used materials in this industry due to its ability to create a variety of shapes for chairs, stools and tables. The company’s specialists seek to create great designs that pose a challenge for other manufacturers to copy or replicate.

Updating Reverse Engineering Technique

To produce a new original piece of furniture, MU Form would normally ship a physical prototype model to a factory overseas so they reverse engineer the model by using a router duplicator to create a wood mold. “While this method worked to get us started in making a somewhat accurate representation of the chair or stool prototype, it didn’t allow us to efficiently fine-tune some of the curvatures and surfaces that we knew needed to be fixed for the final production furniture,” says Mark.

The previous method for capturing the V Chair’s dimensions for production.

For example, surfaces that were meant to be absolutely flat could not be adjusted for the mold in the initial stages. Instead, some manual work needed to be done on the mold, which would sometimes lead to inaccuracies in the final production pieces. Additionally, this method did not provide for mirroring the furniture, which would ensure accurate symmetry.

The company has recently started to outsource 3D modeling services to Artec’s office in Palo Alto, CA. This is what the workflow is like now: the furniture designer develops the physical prototype of a furniture piece. To reverse engineer the piece, the prototype is 3D scanned with Artec Eva. The raw point data is then used to create contours in Rhino 3D, in particular to accurately model every nuance in curvatures and radii.

The 3D model is then emailed to the factory which creates an accurate CNC metal mold directly from the file. The company also uses 3D model renders for patent processing and to show upcoming products to potential clients.

Processing the furniture

The chair is wood with a matte finish, and some grain lines helped the Artec Eva stay on track. I captured the front, back, edges and handle in separate scans, then snapped them together with the align tool.

Processing took less than an hour. After aligning the data together, we used Registrations, Outliers Removal, and Smooth Fusional gorithms, which worked really well. We were able to reduce our data down to .1 quality accuracy very quickly. The seat was 1.7 million polys / 89.2 Mb. Each leg was about 550 k polys / 30 Mb.We exported the files in STL format and emailed them to the client via a download link.”

Mark says that he is most excited about precision: “The precision of reverse-engineering the prototypes and having the ability to fine-tune digital models allows us to move toward a totally new  level of quality and consistency for our furniture.” Mark adds that MU Form plans to continue working with Artec to make other furniture pieces, including tables, chaise lounges, and other larger pieces.

Mark adds that MU Form plans to continue working with Artec to make other furniture pieces, including tables, chaise lounges, and other larger pieces.