We have developed a virtual 3D surface scanner to aid in our software and hardware development. The virtual scanner takes a 3D model (left image above) and "scans" it in one pass, leaving, much as a real scanner would, holes in the data (right image above - the holes are marked in blue). This provides us with a completely hardware-independent means for calculating best-next-views and angles needed for subsequent passes of the scanner in order to fill in the holes.

Here is a screen shot of the control panel we use to set parameters for the virtual scanner.