General Considerations

3D Imaging occurs in a 3D digital world populated with 3D digital objects.

The digital world has the properties of length, height, and depth represented by the cartesian coordinate system's X,Y, and Z axes. Animation adds a fourth dimension, time.

3D digital objects are either built synthetically using modeling software or assembled from scanned data acquired from the'real world'.

Synthetic 3D objects can be created with numerous software packages intended for industrial design, or computer animation. Synthetic objects range from those meticulously constructed from extensive documentary data, to those based solely on the imagination.

When building objects from scan data, huge numbers of surface position samples, known as point clouds, are acquired from the subject and assembled in software, along with their textures, into virtual objects. These virtual objects can be examined in 3D, measured, photographed, animated, and reproduced back into the 'real world'.

The learning curve for modeling and animation software is steep and long. The necessity of highly skilled labor and the process' inherent complexity makes creating fully 3D content a costly and time intensive undertaking.