True, but at 8 cm maximum they work best , it will depends of the flatness of the surface .
If rounded smaller distance is needed at max 8 cm , if flat surface, it should be not smaller than 6 or bigger than 10 cm
Absolutely will not help you , you will need to learn more and will not speed up anything .
Unless you get Trackit, no markers and you can scan it easier , primed or not .
I use a spacing of 8 to 10cm for my MetroY Pro 
1 Like
That why I am the only one around that never complaining about markers and losing of tracking 
But of course if scanning bigger flatter surfaces, it is ok. For curved even slightly you will run in troubles because of the curvature and angle of visibility
That really does look like a job for a Trackit. While I would advice against buying one for just one job, you might find someone who is close to you who does have a Trackit. They could probably scan your entire car in just a few hours.
Since you are on a bit of a time crunch, maybe a Trackit scanmeister can come over and scan your car. If you had more time and 3D scanner knowledge, you could probably rent one and do it yourself.
Where are you located? Something like “Central Texas” is enough info. If you don’t want to make even that info public shoot, me a private message.
Bruce
Bruce, im in southern Pennsylvania
Welcome to 3d scanning. Its always more difficult than everyone thinks it will be. It is a skill and there is a certain amount of art to it. You’ve picked quite the undertaking as your learning curve project.
You will be hard pressed to get away from anything that uses markers at a low price point. Global markers can help you on these bigger objects with loss of tracking. The scanner is just referencing them during the scan instead of searching for markers and trying to keep track of them and the surface. It just seems less taxing on the system as a whole when using global markers.
If you are using the surfaces for molds, you have to generate the surfaces anyways in cad, so the markers shouldn’t really matter. How are your cad and reverse engineering skills. That’s the whole other half of the equation that nobody thinks about as well. They think that they got a scanner and it will magically give them the model they want.
Your scans are looking pretty good so far. I think you are on a good path and can get what you need with your Range.
1 Like
Ah, too far for me. Try posting a message with the Trackit tag, looking from someone in your area with a Trackit. Seriously, that is what the Trackit was designed to do–this type of project.
Like I said, I don’t recommend buying one for this project only, but with the Black Friday sale of the Trackit, it was only like $100 more than buying it via kickstart and having to pay $1000 is shipping and tariffs. Plus, Amazon has a very generous return policy. Kickstarter has none.
Bruce
Nick have a good idea here , the last chance to do it using Range .
However my friend from UK scanned the whole car using Range , it just took him over 16 hours of scanning .
I have done a bunch of scans today using tracker mode and im getting the hang of the scanning part. In the pc program can you do the fusion without doing the one click fusion? I won’t allow me to do anything unless i do that first but i don’t want to loose detail like the phone app does.
You have to click on the fusion, button, not one click fusion. This allows you more control over your fusion and meshing steps, which you want in your case. You can go through and set your fusion point distance. Then do your isolation and overlap to remove noise. Dont touch the smooth or simplify. Then mesh, don’t mesh any finer than you set your fusion point distance or you just introduce artificial noise into the scan by creating nodes between your fused points. Any smoothing you want to do should be done once meshed.
I find that one click usually gets rid of details I want to hang on to and tends to smooth more than I’d want.
1 Like
Ok i scanned all of my drivers side and i was able to get most of the side skirt and quarter panel in one scan but unfortunately i think the file is to large for my computer to process because it crashes every time i try the fusion process at 0.3mm. Should i do this differently or can someone help me with the processing? I may have over scanned areas more than once to try and capture everything. I did do other areas to merge to this like the front and back ot the sode skirt and in the vent area of the side skirt.
It looks already better @Stealthmode93
Scan everything you can , process it and find someone that can do reverse engineering of it for you , we have lots of people doing this kind of work in our community here , for small price you could have a perfect finished result. Unless you find someone doing it for free but I doubt because it will cost some time to do the reverse engineering.
Thanks. I have no problem paying someone to do the reverse engineering. These scans are my insurance policy im case my car gets damaged and i need to make a new part. At that time ill 3d print what i need and make the mold from that piece. I found out my laptop only has 8gb of ram so definitely why it wont process my scans. Definitely more of a learning curve than i thought but fun to learn the new process. I definitely like scanning with my phone attached rather than hooked to a laptop. Might invest in a miraco later on if i keep progressing. I just hope my scans are clean enough for what i need.
1 Like
I have been a CAD designer in the civil engineering field for 26 years so CAD is not anything new to me but the reverse engineering part from a mesh is new. Id definitely like to learn that as well.
You can ask @Johnathan he is professional and doing it everyday in his Auto shop. Send him PM , he may help you out on this project even with reverse engineering.
1 Like
Just a question because i don’t know the capabilities. After the scan is done and the mesh is good and clean, can that be be 3d printed or does it have to be reverse engineered to be able to print.
It should be reverse engineered to have the proper dimensions and proper surface. It would looks better and polished. Nobody use scans of this type to do anything but use it as a base for reverse engineering.
Would scanning global markers first then scanning the point cloud allow me to get better detail and track better than doing this in marker mode?
If you have a watertight mesh, you can export it as an stl and print that way. But I think you’d have a tough time getting to that point from what you have. Its better to reverse engineer it.
Global markers still uses the markers, but it saves the locations of all the markers first. Then when you are scanning it just looks at those as reference points. I find that I am able to scan quicker and dont have as much “tracking lost” or “need more markers” errors when I do global markers. It seems like the scanner/software doesnt have to work as hard and its just picking up the surface rather than constantly looking for dots. I know thats not quite how it works, but thats how I think of it. I know it taxes my computer less if I do it that way with my MetroX.
Miraco is a good all around scanner. Not being tied to the computer is nice and being able to see exactly how your scan is going in real time is helpful. The only downside is its still an IR scanner, so black and shiny stuff is a struggle. I’ve been doing a lot of black vehicle interior scans lately and the MetroX has been a lifesaver there.