Scanning and importing a cat leg stump to design around within autodesk inventor?

Right now I'm overseas with the US military and I ordered a folgertech i3 prusa to keep me preoccupied while I'm here. About 15 mins ago however I found out that one of my cats (Sid) got ran over by a threshing machine (farm equipment). He's going to be alright but he lost part of his leg in the process. I want to be able to scan in his leg stump and make a model of a prosthetic leg around it for him. Problem is though I don't know how to convert anything from a mesh to an actual file I can work around within autodesk inventor. I have used other programs as well but all of them aside from sketchup are all similar to inventor so they don't really work with mesh files very well.

Is there any good way of going about this?

Hi Cody:

Sorry to hear Sid is having a bad day.

This site has a sub (and sub-sub) forum related to 3d printed prosthesis:

http://3dprintboard.com/forumdisplay...-Robotic-Limbs

You might find something useful there or someone who can help.

I don't know exactly which tools are best for the sort of project you're thinking of. Importing mesh data seems to always be a kind of tedious process. Not sure what kind of scanner you'll be able to use for a "Sid Scan"..., though there are programs out there that facilitate extraction of mesh data from Dicom(aka MRI et al)files..., and I'm guess'n Sid won't sit still for a conventional 3d laser scan.

I don't know anything about Autodesk Inventor, but there might be better tools for dealing with organic shapes and mesh data, e.g., Blender.

Good luck!

I think that when you want to sculpt organic shapes (like in your case i presume), mesh are not ideal. I'm currently playing around with voxels (3d pixels) instead and although at first one would loose his bearings due to the lack of reference points, it's pretty cool once you get used to it and there so many things you can do with voxels you cannot do with usual CAD systems.

Try 3dcoat, from http://3d-coat.com/3d-coat-45/

They have a free trial fully functional version,

and lot's of great tutorials here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/PILGWAY3DCoat/videos

I import my scans and sculpt around them, really enjoyable.

Some projects that are connected with the health of pets are cool!