Packaging Reverse Engineering for Consumer Products

What the Industry Needs

Reverse engineering is a process by which the design of a product is analysed or recreated using a physical part as a starting point. In packaging design, there are two fundamental objects involved: the product and its package. Consequently, reverse engineering in the packaging industry can require dimensions from both objects. When designing a custom package for a specific product, its dimensions can be extracted and used as a reference to build the 3D CAD model of the package. After this operation, the dies or the molds can be properly fabricated with the resulting CAD model. In addition to that, the molds, the dies and the packages themselves can also be scanned in order to extract part of the design or to do a 3D comparison with the reference CAD model for Q.A. purposes. The critical steps in reverse engineering are acquiring, accurately and efficiently, the dimensions of the object and extracting the necessary information from the resulting scan in order to create the new design with the correct features. In fact, in the packaging industry, the main challenge will always be to get the perfect fit.