There are various segmentation and surfacing methods to create CAD models from measured data. First the difficulties of creating a good surface structure over a polygonal mesh are investigated, followed by investigating the most important approaches according to the amount of user interaction, computational efficiency and surface quality. References to commercial systems are also added. The focus of the paper is to present (i) automatic surfacing and (ii) functional decomposition. New demands and emerging technologies are also identified to trace out current trends in digital shape reconstruction.