I’m a fairly new owner of a POP1 scanner. Impressed of the scanning of small objects, when using the turning table. But having a hard time trying to scan larger object, specifically a car engine. I’m using developer spray and a lot of markers. Still it looses track all the time,
First of all I’m a bit confused about the different modes when using the markers. If I have added a lot of markers to the object, should I only go for “marker”-mode? Or will the markers still be useful if going with for instance the “feature”-mode?
Yes, the markers are useful only when using Marker mode.
You might try Body mode to get a somewhat lower-resolution scan (that may still be accurate enough for your needs). The wider field of view may improve tracking due to there being more unique features.
Alternatively, many users are getting better tracking by scattering crumpled paper or other unique features on or around the object being scanned (they’d have to be edited out later).
Thanks for the tips, just tested some different modes and approaches. I wish there was a mode, similar to expensive scanners, to separately Scan only the markers, which later is used when scanning the geometry. Creating the basic envelope and position for the scanner to always find track on track again…
The body mode was way faster, but the software crashed every time before I was able to save the file. in my case the marker mode is pretty much unusable - I can’t believe the complete car Scan on youtube is made in marker mode… a pity I’ve already spent a Fortune on wasted markers
I can’t really complain because of the budget price, but the software is REALLY unstable. I’ve spent a few hours now trying to Scan this engine and Come up with nothing useful…
@Dawah I can give you small tip , watch how many frames you getting while scanning , the best is to not overdoing the frames like for example maximum 300 frames fuse and scan again , make sure you not overlapping the same areas too much , this method will be less heavy on your system and you will avoid crashing , having too many frames usually ending in bad scan results , also plan your scanned sections , this way you can get huge scans all at once , if you still crash I would suggest to fuse each cloud point section and use Revo Studio for merging and meshing it .
thanks for the tip! I realized I probably had to many frames (probably above 2000) which made it heavy. I now reduced it, trying to not exceed a thousand, this way it went a bit better. But for some reason Revo Scan is crashing all the time for me, even with very few frames. I do need to work with the older Handy scan which doesn’t crash that often.
But I find it hard to get a good merge, when having too many different scan sections. For my engine I ended up with 13 different ones and the result was kind of okay but far from perfect, the model got a bit warped from one end to the other.
Sorry, what did you mean with “plan your scanned sections”? Just to think it through before, which section I want to scan, or was it something else you were meaning?
I’ve merged as many as 16 separate scans. The trick is to make sure that at least 20% of any two separate scans cover the same area in order for the automatic merge operation to succeed.
Alternatively, you can select 3 or more pairs of reference points in each scan to manually align the objects.
Just as you said think through, see how many frames , I think 1000 frames per section is a lot , try to move the scanner faster . in 20 second you should have less than 300 frames and bigger area at once , I would say … practice as there is nothing else you can do . And try to avoid moving back and forth on each section as it will overlap the points and hard to fix later.
I was scanning a wall with deep ornaments , 7 x 4 ft , planned the sections and moved up to down stopped with each 300 frames and as @JeffLindstrom already mentioned scanning 20% of the previous scan section .
Jeff and PopUPTheVolume, thanks a lot for your input! I will try again. I believe I had used to little of the developer spray in some areas as well. There were a few areas where the scanner seemed to have a hard time to pick anything up.
I just viewed a youtube video from “John Himself”, he went over a large part very quickly as a starting point, with lots of areas uncovered. But he used this first scan as base for the merge, and had separate scans to cover the missing areas. might be a good aproach as well
Yeah, I’ve tried both of them and ended ended up using a mix. To me the merging feature worked best with handy studio, but to create the mesh I used revo studio since this gives me the possibility to set the detail level (handy studio deleted too much information when meshing) and I found the merging worked best after meshing…
Another thing which I haven’t really understood yet, is the exposure vs gain settings while scanning. The gain value I believe I do understand, it gives quite direct feedback. But the exposure on the camera view (upper left Window), does that have anything to do with the scanning result? Or is it only for me to see the camera view during scanning?
Regarding the scanning , the exposure RGB Camera is only important if you are scanning color data. I tested it in complete darkness and it does not have any influence on the scanning results .
The key to a perfect scan is the Depth camera sensor , click first the Auto, then after it adjusts itself click the manual , the scanned object should have a perfect grayscale tone overall .
look at the example below
So what does it all do ? the Depth Camera sensor settings?, it isolate the scanned objects from the rest of the scene , it is like you adjusting the DOF , depth of field in your camera , but this sensor also react to various surfaces , so it need to be adjusted differently based of the materials the object is made of , I found out that objects that have a lot of synthetic materials like nylon, plastic, PVC etc… are harder to scan than objects made from natural materials like wood , plaster , cotton etc… The major issue is the absorption of the light and reflectivity . Oily surfaces will diffuse the infrared laser light structure and create a lot of noises , same for shiny plastics or metals that will scatter the Laser pattern in different directions making it impossible for the depth sensors to pick up the pattern precisely. Also black color plastic / PVC /Paint will absorb completely the Infrared light pattern , making it impossible to scan anything . For the same reason the turntable is not visible while scanning .
If you want a perfect scan , you need to prepare the surface one way or another , sometimes the gain settings are enough , and if not you need to use 3D scanning Spray and leave all your troubles behind .Stay away from bright windows light , as the natural light contain infrared light ( IR) that will mess up with your scanning results by fading the laser pattern , I found out that LED light don’t affect the Infrared laser pattern at all , no matter the brightness . Best outdoor scanning is on a cloudy day or late afternoon, but you can still use battery operated LED light for support if needed .
I will try to do a new scan with different approach. I believed also the actual geometry scanning was dependent of light, so I added lamps. This may very well have made the result worse.
@Dawah you welcome , you can scan in complete darkness , it works even better , you see POP2 is more of a infrared projector , as long there is no infrared light in your light source you are all good .
