DE-Engineering's projects are related to production tasks that require high precision. These include orders from aircraft manufacturers, manufacturers of wristwatch mechanisms, and defense companies. Most contracts restrict the disclosure of information. And those that are published on the YouTube channel of Dmitry Epstein, the founder of the company, surprise with the scale of work and professionalism. Dmitry is an engineer, and when asked "what projects are interesting to him," he replies that he doesn’t think about such categories: "Nothing special — you scan and work, you just need to approach the process creatively — how and in what sequence to scan. The main thing is to understand what should happen."

Dmitry has been practicing reverse engineering since 1989. I started with a caliper and a curvimeter, cut patterns out of cardboard and millimeter paper. Back then, the error for large parts was on the order of a millimeter, and for small parts it was even more. Accuracy has increased with the advent of the 3D scanner and reverse engineering in electronic form. In Dmitry’s practice, the customer placed the highest demands on the details of the wristwatch mechanism.: 200 microns, and these requirements have been met.

Since 2012, Dmitry has been using the RangeVision PRO family optical 3D structured illumination scanner. Gom Atos is also available in the arsenal. The engineer said that the RangeVision scanner is just as suitable for his tasks. It is also more compact and less susceptible to vibrations in customers' workshops. Among the advantages of the German competitor, Dmitry noted the ability to delete unnecessary fragments and wipe entire sections at once in the scanning window of the scanner software.

The largest object from DE-Engineering's practice reaches eight meters. Dmitry uses several tricks to scan the giants. Applies markers to strips of masking tape so that you don’t have to waste extra time peeling them off and adds geometry to minimize loss of accuracy. The three spheres that he superimposes on the digitized object help the scans stitch more precisely. Dmitry is an expert in scanning large objects. It is enough to watch a video about the fuselage of an airplane or the fuel tank of a helicopter to make sure of this.

The car reverse engineering case continues a number of large-scale projects. The Citroen Jumpy body for the manufacture of armor was scanned and 3D models were built that repeat the shape changes with recesses and depressions of the fasteners. The modification technology proved to be effective: it saved time, effort and money. The metal plates were made according to the model, and they fit perfectly. The bent and welded sheets simply had to be fixed to the body, without cutting or drilling anything. They inserted it, and you’re done. The reverse engineering of the car body was carried out so precisely. It took a couple of days to scan it, and another five days to process the scans and build a mathematical model. The customer modified two machines to suit his needs.

The approach to scan processing in DE-Engineering should be discussed separately. Dmitry prefers to work not with polygons, but with a cloud of points, paying great attention to their "thinning". It locally reduces the number of points on surfaces that do not require high detail, and leaves the maximum number in those places where small elements are located. He says it makes it easier for both him and the computer to work. For example, in the case of a car body, the scan file weighed about 2 GB, and after "cleaning" it weighed 150 MB.

It is convenient for an engineer to work from the beginning (processing a point cloud) to the end (building a mathematical model) in one program, so he uses CATIA for automated modeling. This is also good because the customer fully sees the construction tree in the file.

Dmitry works not only with objects of mechanical shape, but also with organic surfaces, take, for example, a case with mannequins. The clothing design company provided a copy of the 46th size with a request to make models from it for the size range from 42nd to 52nd. Dmitry scanned it on the first RangeVision PRO zone. By the standards provided, I increased and decreased the volumes of different parts of the body in CATIA, it was impossible to scale the entire file proportionally — this contradicts human physiology. New plastic mannequins were cast using CAD models on numerically controlled equipment.

At DE-Engineering, the scanner is turned on not only in the first zone. Small items, such as jewelry or wristwatch mechanisms, are scanned in the fourth zone. They use all the standard features of the scanner and additional ones: they have purchased 9 mm lenses. Equipment with extensive capabilities plus the talent of an engineer are components of the success of projects.