3D Image scanner/Scanning

[lwizardl]

Hey does anyone here know much about scanning of real life objects ? I know a few years ago they had a few things inside game developer magazine for taking a object like a basketball etc and using this arm to trace the object into a 3d modelling application like Maya. But I was wondering if anyone here had any experience with this.

 

[b26354]

A digitising arm is useful for generating low resolution meshes or measuring points from real objects. But you really need a laser or structured light scanner to get fine detail.

if you have some patience you can do it yourself with a webcam and a line-laser

DAVID 3D Scanner

But, to get higher quality scans people are motorising the laser to keep the speed constant.

I have one of these which I bought second hand

https://www.nextengine.com/

but, I wouldn't recomend one unless, again, you have a lot of patience, have the biggest, fastest PC you can buy, and some CAD skills to rebuild the geo into something usable. And the software is pretty horrible - I've been using the software from the david scanner to process scans from the nextengine scanner

 

[lwizardl]

thanks for the information I'm looking to use them to scan in small item props

 

[mccordia]

You can also use a program like Bojou or other camera-tracking software.

Do a freehand/loose cameramove around a human face, and instead of using the cameramove, you only use the resulting point-cloud.

Its not perfect, but for sure, gives you great actual 3D spacing, that you can use to correctly proportion a model.

 

[star-art]

I wonder how distortion from the camera could affect the results? Many cheap cameras have a good deal of barrel distortion. If you try to cure this by zooming in on the subject from a distance, you get a "flattening" of perspective that also is not 100% accurate.

 

[zenix]

I've used top of the line stuff, and held the brand new israeli scanner