I am a total newbie to the world of 3d scanning. I purchased a Pop 3 Plus about 7 months ago and have tinkered with it to learn. Recently I had a clear piece break off on my Dyson vacuum and thought that maybe this would be a good reason to attempt to scan and print the part. I have spent the past few days looking at tutorials and they make things look so easy, but my results are terrible. At this point, I want to reset what I think I have learned and start over cause I have to be missing something. That or perhaps I purchased the wrong scanner for what I am trying to do.
Looking for some basic guidance to ensure I am not over complicating things. I attached a picture of the item I am trying to scan. Its a clear plastic piece that is about 7.5 inches long, but the base is only .5 inch wide with those 2 longer arms extending out 2.5 inches. Any tips how I should tackle this? Spray/no spray? Turntable / no turntable? Auto exposure/AWB? Backdrop/no backdrop? Color of backdrop? Markers/No Markers? Any special settings I should consider?
Make the part white (use talc, white paint, or 3D scanning spray), use markers, and a black background—this should improve the scan quality. Then, I would create a solid model from the resulting scan in Quick Surface.
Thank you for the guidance. When using the markers, am I putting those on the object themselves, or around the object? Is there a tutorial that walks me through the solid model / quick scan process you mentioned? thank you again for the advice.
You are learning its not as easy as it looks. Reverse Engineering parts is a lot of work! Most people think that the scanner is a magic tool, but its just part of the equation.
It sounds like you were having trouble getting a good scan. Lets start with than and then we can talk about how to get from scan to 3d print.
Clear doesn’t scan well, but white does, so as goganihe said, make it white. Talc powder, foot spray, baby powder, even flour works in a pinch. Your exposure settings should be such that you get a mix of red and blue in the preview screen. White picks up on the lower end. Darker usually requires more exposure.
You are going to have to do multiple scans and merge them together to get a good finished scan. The part is small enough you can just place markers around the object to scan it. The orientation you pictured is a good start, then flip it over and get the other side. The thing you have to remember when merging scans is you need some amount of overlap for the scans to line up. So you need to make sure each scan you do is repeating some area of the part in each scan.
To 3d print you have two options. Either your scan needs to be a watertight mesh (no holes) or you have to create a parametric model in another program. Not sure what you modeling experience is. Folks have used Blender to fix up scans enough to print. I feel like that is not going to work in this case. I would bring your mesh into something like fusion360 and get out the calipers. A combination of using the scan to get angles and calipers to get the dimensions right will get you a part.
On the 3d print side this is a tricky part to print via FDM. It would be a good SLA resin part.
