My first several attempts were unmitigated failures. In retrospect, I think it is because my targets were too smooth, even with Marker mode used.
This wind charm (it blows good luck) is normally in the patio.
I scanned in Detail mode, with the charm placed on a turntable. The resulting PLY was 85 MB.
The HandyScan PC software allows me to pause a scan and change the scanner position (say, by extending the tripod mount) or moving to a completely different position before resuming. While not perfect, it has aligned the data it is getting with data previously acquired.
In this case:
- I scanned the face at approx. 60° from the orthogonal while rotating the turntable at a moderate rate.
- I then paused the scan and positioned the POP directly over the face (approx. 0° from the orthogonal) and continued to fill in small areas before moving the scanner closer to the edge (the flat areas were being ignored in the other scans).
- I saved this scan and set up a horizontal scan to get the thick edge of the charm.
- In Handy Studio, I aligned the two scans and merged them.
- I used the default file format (PLY) and loaded those into MeshLab for conversion the STL; I could have exported each in STL or OBJ (including textures), but this software isn’t fully mature and it doesn’t remember settings (preferred file folders and file types, among other things).
- In TurboCAD (my Mechanical CAD software), I used TC Surface Simplifcation to cut the number of triangles in half, then again by four for a result of slightly more than 1/8th the original file size. The results are almost indistinguishable, but this may be because I used the Smooth function in Handy Studio before exporting and loading into TurboCAD.
