ScanTo3D converts scan data — a polygon mesh from a 3D scanner, or a raw point cloud — into SOLIDWORKS surface and solid geometry. The result is a parametric model you can mate, dimension, and modify like anything else in the vault. What the tool can’t do is magic: the output quality is bounded by mesh quality and the complexity of the original geometry. Organic shapes with tight blends and small radii will fight you. Machined parts with flat faces, cylinders, and cones are what ScanTo3D handles well.

Note on SOLIDWORKS 2026 GA: If you upgraded to 2026 and found that Surface Wizard’s automatic mode generates only flat surfaces regardless of the scan geometry, you hit a regression introduced in the GA release. The Surface Wizard’s analytical surface detection was producing planar approximations for all regions, including cylinders and cones that previous versions handled correctly. This is fixed in SP3.2 — update before using automatic mode.

What ScanTo3D Requires

ScanTo3D is included in SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium. Standard edition does not include it. Verify under Help → About SOLIDWORKS → Licenses.

Enable the add-in: Tools → Add-Ins → ScanTo3D. Check both the “Load Now” and “Start Up” boxes if you use it regularly.

Supported Input Formats

Mesh files:

  • .stl (ASCII or binary — most scanner software exports binary, which SolidWorks reads faster)
  • .obj (Wavefront — common from photogrammetry software like Agisoft Metashape, RealityCapture)
  • .ply (Stanford polygon format — used by structured-light scanners and some LIDAR pipelines)
  • .3ds (3D Studio — less common in engineering contexts)
  • .wrl / .vrml

Point cloud files:

  • .xyz, .asc, .txt (space or comma-separated XYZ coordinates, one point per line)
  • .igs / .iges (when used as a point data container, not the usual IGES surface use)
  • .vda (VDA-FS, German automotive surface exchange format)

The practical choice for most workflows: export .stl from your scanner. It’s universally supported, file sizes are manageable, and SOLIDWORKS reads it without translation overhead.

Step 1: Import the Scan Data

Go to Insert → Scan to 3D → Mesh File (for STL/OBJ/PLY) or Point Cloud (for XYZ/ASC).

The mesh appears as a Mesh feature in the FeatureManager, listed under “Surface Bodies”. It’s not a surface body in the normal sense — it’s a triangulated representation. You’ll see the triangle count in the feature properties.

Units check first. Scan data rarely comes in the units your part document uses. Before proceeding, verify: does the bounding box look right? A part that should be 200mm wide shouldn’t show as 200 inches. If the scale is wrong, don’t use Insert → Scale to fix it — that modifies the mesh in place and can degrade quality. Instead, close and change your document units (Tools → Options → Document Properties → Units) to match the scan data’s native unit, then reopen.

Step 2: Mesh Prep Wizard

With the mesh feature selected (or right-clicking the mesh in the graphics area), launch Tools → Scan to 3D → Mesh Prep Wizard.

The wizard has four stages:

Decimate

Reduces triangle count while preserving shape. Scan data from structured-light or photogrammetry systems can exceed 2 million polygons — Surface Wizard becomes sluggish above ~500k triangles.

The decimation slider controls the target percentage. Don’t decimate more than you need to. Aggressive decimation rounds sharp edges and small fillets into stepped approximations. As a working rule: keep enough triangles that your smallest feature (the smallest fillet, the narrowest slot) is represented by at least 8–10 triangles across its width.

Check the “Preserve Edge” option — it protects boundary edges between flat regions, which is where feature detection happens in Surface Wizard.

Orient

Sets which direction is “up” relative to a reference face or plane. If your scan data was captured from multiple positions and stitched, it may arrive in an arbitrary orientation. Use the orient controls to align the mesh with a natural coordinate system — flat face parallel to the XY plane, main axis along Z.

This step isn’t strictly required but makes Surface Wizard’s automatic region detection more reliable, since it uses axis-aligned initial guesses.

Smooth / Noise Reduction

Applies a Laplacian smooth to reduce scanner noise. The slider controls the number of smoothing passes. More passes produce a cleaner surface but blur sharp edges.

For mechanical parts with well-defined edges: use the minimum smoothing needed (1–2 passes) and rely on “Sharpen” in the next sub-step to recover feature edges. Over-smoothing a bracket or housing will round every edge into an approximation.

Fill Holes

Fills triangulated holes in the mesh. Common causes: scan shadow zones (regions the scanner couldn’t see), deleted artifact triangles, or mesh import errors.

ScanTo3D fills holes with either a Flat or Curvature-matched patch. Flat fill works well for holes in flat regions; curvature-matched attempts to continue the local surface. For large structural holes (the bolt pattern cut-outs in a flange, for example), don’t fill — those are real geometry that Surface Wizard needs to see.

Step 3: Surface Wizard

Tools → Scan to 3D → Surface Wizard opens on the prepared mesh.

The wizard offers two modes:

Automatic Mode

SolidWorks analyzes the mesh, detects regions of uniform curvature, classifies them as plane, cylinder, cone, sphere, or B-spline, and fits analytical surfaces to each region. The result is a collection of trimmed surfaces, one per detected region.

Automatic mode works well on machined parts: prismatic geometry, pockets with flat bottoms, cylindrical bores, chamfers. For those shapes, it produces clean NURBS surfaces that knit into a watertight solid with minimal intervention.

The 2026 GA regression specifically affected this mode. The analytical surface classifier was defaulting to planar classification for all regions — cylinders and cones were fit with tangent planes instead of analytical primitives. The workaround before SP3.2 was to use Guided mode exclusively and define each surface type manually.

Guided Mode

You define each surface region manually:

  1. Sketch closed regions on the mesh using the Sketch on Mesh tool (Insert → Sketch on Mesh). Sketch lines snap to the triangulated surface.
  2. For each sketched region, select the surface type: Plane, Cylinder, Cone, Sphere, B-Spline, Revolution, Extrusion.
  3. SolidWorks fits the selected analytical surface to the enclosed region.

Guided mode is slower but gives you control. For complex organic geometry where automatic detection produces fragmented or misclassified regions, guided is the only reliable path.

Practical workflow: Run automatic mode first. Inspect the resulting surfaces. Where the fit is wrong (a cylinder approximated as a stack of planar patches, a cone classified as a sphere), delete those surfaces, switch to guided, and re-fit only the problem regions.

Step 4: Surface Quality Check

Before knitting, inspect each fitted surface:

  • Zebra stripes: View → Display → Zebra Stripes. Discontinuities in the stripe pattern across a surface boundary indicate tangency problems. These cause knit failures.
  • Surface normals: Insert → Surface → Offset Surface (distance = 0) reports errors on degenerate surfaces. If offset fails, the source surface has issues.
  • Self-intersections: SolidWorks will flag these during knit. The Fixing Self-Intersected Surfaces tool (Tools → Scan to 3D → Fix Self-Intersection) is a last resort — better to refit the surface cleanly.

Gap tolerance between adjacent surfaces matters for the knit step. Most scan-derived surfaces won’t have sub-micron gaps. A tolerance of 0.1mm is reasonable for mechanical parts; tighter tolerances for precision components.

Step 5: Knit to Solid

Insert → Surface → Knit Surface. Select all the fitted surfaces. Check “Try to form solid” — if the surface set is watertight (closed, no boundary edges), SolidWorks creates a solid body directly.

If the knit fails:

  • Use Insert → Surface → Fill to close gaps that weren’t filled during Mesh Prep.
  • Check for missing faces: View → Show All Points doesn’t help here; use Tools → Check on each surface to find degenerate triangles.
  • The gap between two fitted surfaces can be bridged with a Lofted Surface or Filled Surface using the boundary edges as guide curves.

For thin-walled parts (sheet metal enclosures, plastic housings), the solid from a full closed surface knit is often too complex to turn into sheet metal features. A simpler approach: knit only the outer faces, use Insert → Boss/Base → Thicken with a known wall thickness. The thickened solid is easier to work with than a hollow solid from a closed mesh.

When the Mesh Doesn’t Come From ScanTo3D

SOLIDWORKS 2021 and later can import mesh files directly as Mesh Bodies without ScanTo3D: Insert → Mesh File (or drag a .stl into the graphics area). This imports the mesh as a non-parametric body you can use as a reference — sketch on it, dimension to it, build new solid features around it — without going through the Mesh Prep + Surface Wizard pipeline.

This reference modeling approach is often faster for parts where you’re remaking known geometry: measure the scan, build the model from scratch using those measurements, verify against the scan. It avoids the surface fitting pipeline entirely and produces a cleaner parametric model. The trade-off is that it doesn’t give you a surface derived from the actual scan.

Alternatives When ScanTo3D Fails

ScanTo3D’s surface fitting is limited to the analytical types it knows. For organic geometry — human forms, terrain, aesthetically shaped consumer products — it will produce a fragmented B-spline mess.

Open-source path:

  1. MeshLab → Filters → Remeshing → Screened Poisson Reconstruction. Generates a clean watertight mesh from the point cloud, better than ScanTo3D’s hole-fill for complex geometry.
  2. Export the cleaned mesh as .ply.
  3. Import into FreeCAD (covered in FreeCAD PartDesign for export) and use the Reverse Engineering workbench (FreeCAD-RvEngineer) for surface patch fitting.
  4. Export as STEP and import into SolidWorks.

The FreeCAD reverse engineering route requires more steps but handles complex geometry that SOLIDWORKS ScanTo3D can’t classify.

Professional tools:

  • Geomagic Design X (3D Systems): the industry standard for scan-to-CAD. Exports directly to SolidWorks parametric features, not just dumb solids. Expensive but significantly faster for complex parts.
  • Geomagic Wrap: mesh processing focused — no direct parametric output, but the mesh quality going into SolidWorks is dramatically better.
  • Artec Studio / FARO Scene: scanner vendor software that produces high-quality watertight meshes pre-aligned for SolidWorks import.

For one-off repair jobs (recovering geometry from a part you no longer have a model for), the ScanTo3D route is worth the effort. For production workflows scanning dozens of parts, the professional tools pay for themselves quickly.

Exporting From the Resulting Solid

Once you have a solid body from ScanTo3D, it’s a normal SolidWorks solid — mates, drawings, and export work the same way. If the part is thin-walled and you’ve used Thicken to create it, SolidWorks may recognize it as a sheet metal candidate: Insert → Sheet Metal → Convert to Sheet Metal. If it accepts the conversion, you get a flat pattern for free.

If the geometry is close but not quite parametric enough for Convert to Sheet Metal (non-uniform thickness, slightly non-planar bend zones), the usual approach is to rebuild the flat-state geometry manually using the scan solid as a reference, then use Base Flange to build the sheet metal model properly. The batch DXF export guide covers the downstream export once you have the sheet metal model.

Upgrade to SP3.2 Before Running Surface Wizard

The 2026 regression is the most common reason teams contact Dassault support about ScanTo3D failures this year. If you’re on 2026 GA and every Surface Wizard automatic run produces only flat surfaces regardless of the mesh geometry, the fix is SP3.2 — not a workflow change. Check Help → About SOLIDWORKS for your SP level. If you need to stay on an earlier SP for stability reasons, use Guided mode exclusively until your organization can upgrade.

The surface fitting algorithm changes between service packs without announcement in standard release notes — the 2026 regression wasn’t in the GA What’s New document. SP3.2 release notes confirm the fix under the ScanTo3D section.