joining two halves into one polygonal model

[Homer-Jay]

I am attempting to scan two halves of a pattern and merge them into one watertight model to be used in a casting solidification simulation program. I could use some tips on two fronts. first; is joining the two halves of the pattern. i'm having a little trouble with this due to my still being a relatively new user. so far i can open both halves of the model and use the manual alignment tool to get them close to perfectly matched. we often have a slight amount of pattern shift in our castings, so a minor misalignment is no big deal. once i align them, i've been inserting a plane in between the top and bottom half of my model and trimming the boundries back and re-extruding them to the common plane so the boundries will at least be coplanar. i need some help figuring out how to take the seam out of the center though. i have used the magik hammer (mesh rebuilder) with varying degrees of success. i've thought of surfacing over the seam, but am not all that proficient at surfacing yet. i can't figure out how to join the surface patches to my model and get rid of the control points. one thing that just occured to me and that i will try is to try the gap tool in the hole filler. and second; what is the best way to export a polygonal model to a useable stl file. any feedback would be greatly appreciated

[Homer-Jay]

for some reason i cant attach a jpeg screenshot to this post

[Homer-Jay]

ok i figured this out. my core boxes often consist of only one half that makes both halves of the core. so what i do is scan my core, clean up the boundry edges by rebuilding the edges back to a plane, mirror the scan, merge the top and bottom halves,  and fill the holes. works like a charm. the resultant polygonal model is watertight. now with a cope and drag, which are top and bottom, in two different scans, i suspect i can line them up as best as possible, and either use the merge function, or the gap filler. i wont know till i do it.

[C_Simithraaratchy]

in PW 2014:

In IMInspect:

- Scan first half of part in a mesh.
- Physically move the part
- Create a new device position with (custom)
- Scan the second half of the part

- Best Fit Data to Data with the two scans from different device positions.  Hopefully you've scanned enough common spots for these scans to merge
- Under Tools > Data Objects > Create Polygonal Models:

we want to use this data tool, as it samples the source meshes' underlying pointclouds to create the "composite" mesh, rather than just combining the two source meshes.  This method is more desirable for accuracy.

source:  PolyWorks Technical Support, when I had this exact issue