First off, I’m not affiliated with anyone, I’m just a curious user and I have my own issues with the scanner and the software.
I’m not sure if that is useful. DXF is a 2D vector graphics format. The 3D scans will be, well, 3D. Of course, the RevoScan could flatten your result onto a 2D plane, but that would be quite lossy. There’s a reason why for professional 3D scanners you usually spend another $10k for a professional reverse engineering software (e.g. SolidWorks + Xtract) which will do nothing but convert the PLY/STL from the scanner into CAD data like STEP or DXF. But in a pinch, Fusion 360 can be rented by the day and it works surprisingly well for extracting 2D sketches as DXF out of a 3D-scanned mesh.
In my impression, the feature tracking (“SLAM”) part of the RevoScan software is pretty bad at handling large smooth areas. But in general, evenly lit spheres work as a marker, you just need to get the scale right. And you will need 10+ spheres visible in any frame, so that it can resolve the visual ambiguities using geometrical constraints. But as @PUTV correctly pointed out, stuff with a lot of wrinkles works really well, because it produces unique shapes in the depth image. I myself have used crumpled painters tape, too, with much success.
I have 0 inside information here, but to me it looks like the feature tracking uses something like SIFT on the depth preview image. That means the part here where SIFT fails: https://youtu.be/IBcsS8_gPzE?feature=shared&t=548 is likely what causes your tracking and alignment errors.
And that means any kind of marker that works well for SIFT will probably also work well for the RevoScan software.
Sadly not. There is currently NO WAY in the software to manually select points to be used as an alignment reference. I agree that this is standard procedure in Metashape or Reality Capture, but RevoScan doesn’t support it yet.
That will only save you money if the laser scanner can capture the entire area in one go. Otherwise, you’ll have exactly the same issues once you need to merge multiple laser scans into one result.
What I would probably try in your situation would be to stick matte painter’s tape into the corners that you want to measure and then take some high-res pictures with a cheap DSLR and throw the images into the Reality Capture “pay as you go” app. You’ll get a free preview and then you can decide if you want to pay $2 to get the actual data.
I believe they see this more as a platform for users to talk to each other.
As you can see here: Feature Request: Turntable + Single frame and here: Feature Request: Pre-Fusion + Keyframe ICP + Final Fusion I bought the MINI 2 which is advertised as a jewelry scanner and while the hardware is fantastic, the RevoScan software is still severely limiting the result quality. But there are workarounds and with a bit of training, I could get amazing results.
In my opinion, Revopoint is a great example for a Kickstarter. They did deliver the hardware, it works, it arrived on time, so I would cut them some slack while they iron out the software issues. And some of us, like me, actually enjoy the tinkering process.
But if you need industrial-grade results now, then Revopoint is probably not the right vendor for you. (my personal opinion)