Hi there,
i am a complete rookie in 3d-scanning and got me a mini in order to scan archaeological finds, especially pottery sherds.
As for now, scanning with the mini works, but I have a lot of questions.
First one:
i have to do front- and backside of my sherds, or up- and downside.
Mostly i put them on a heap of plasticine, scan 360 degrees, turn it upside down and scan again 360 degrees. Then i cut off the parts with the plasticine an merge.
Is this the best way or are there better ones?
Second one:
when i merge two scans, afterwards there is no option to apply texture anymore. But when I apply texure on the separate scans, after merging the texture is gone and no option to apply again.
Revoscan 5.
Apologies for my English, i’m German.
Thanks for Help!
Hi @Archaeoscan.by if you generate textures and later merge , there are only point cloud left without anything , point cloud do not support UVs or Textured so you can’t have it after merging .
You better merge the point cloud before meshing it so you have RGB color that you can convert to textures in other app like Blender or Zbrush for example .
It is impossible to generate textures after merging 2 point clouds since you get complete new object , if there was a way to generate textures from merged scans , it would take so long that is simply inefficient.
Even Cloud Compare don’t support texturing after merging point clouds because next step after merging a RGB point clouds, is extracting color textures and for that you need another program for editing models, UVs and textures .
Hopefully that function will be added in the future but it is not an easy task , they could at least add RGB to Textures what would be faster processing .
Regarding your merging workflow , it is just the way you do … as that is a very good workflow.
thanks a lot!
I will try…
next question:
when i don’t need plasticine, because i have bottom sherds which I can put directly on the turntable, is it better do do one scan with pauses or still several scans and merge afterwards?
Another problem:
when I do 360° scans, with slightly bigger objects, the frames are running away, they often exceed the recommended 350 or so…so processing time gets very long with an i7 and 32 GB of Ram and 8GB Ram for Graphic card…how to deal with that?
Thanks
Do i have to merge the raw or the fused point clouds?
and then:
when to do the editing like isolation, sharping and so on? At point cloud level, at mesh level or only after merging?
Thank you so much for your advice!
Professionally you should scan separately each angle and merge it for best results of a scan , however if the object is not difficult to scan and you want to keep textures , you can pause and rescan angles .in one session , I do that to objects that are not so complex and organic in form , however for hard edge models I would recommend separate angles scanning .
That is true , sometimes big objects I scan takes 3-4K of frames and the processing is long even on my i9 CPU with 64GB .
I have tablet PC with i7 , it taking forever to process even small stuff .
What you can do here to get faster the processing time is choice the proper settings , remember that not always you need the maximum pitch point resolution for fusing … if you doing reverse engineering you need the best precision , but for visual archive you don’t .
However MINI is the most intensive processing time hungry scanner from the collection , because it collecting so much data … however don’t be afraid to change the fusing settings to 0.05mm or even to 0.1mm it will enormously speed up your processing time .
Please experiment with that with different objects , for example when I would scan a mug , I would use pitch point at 0.1mm but if I scan a ring I would go for 0.02mm , so try to evaluate the level of details your object offers… not all of them needs the highest settings .
Always merge the fused cleaned point cloud scans .
Please do that after fusing , how cleaner the point cloud , how better the mesh will be … so after fusing , cut off the parts that are not needed , clean the overlapped points , 1-4 times without changing the settings, it will move automatic , after that please clean isolated points , and then you are ready for merging , or for meshing …
Thanks a lot!
I also ordered a used range for bigger objects hoping it will save me processing time.
I dont’t need 100% accuracy, but sometimes i have very delicate incised or stitched decorations i want to catch sharp and not smeary, and I want to be able to derive cross sections from my models.
Did I understand you right? - You recommend to apply texture not in revoscan, but only in third party software like cloudcompare?
Not exactly, if you scan using color and you have RGB point cloud after merging , you can mesh it , and using other programs like Zbrush or Blender , you can convert the RGB ( color per vertex) to Textures … of course you will need some learning curve to do that , here is video I made when using Zbrush …
Yes I see , definitely MINI is the good job for that to get all the fine details .
I’m not sure how Revopoint handles texturing but if it works on the principle of projecting saved RGB snapshots on the mesh then they must have some position matrix already saved, I don’t see why these matrixes couldn’t be translated the same amount the pointcloud is during alignment. That would allow for having textures with all scans as the pointcloud fuse is already final and the frames that consist it don’t get finely registred on multi-merge (yet) so it really stays the same.
The textures need to be applied to an obj mesh that have already finished UVs before the texturing process begins , each scanned object have a specific information regarding to position as that is crucial for texturing , after merging the multiple objects , the crucial positions of all the individual objects getting lost in the process .
Right now the texture mapping will not works with merged multiple objects as for that a new codes need to be written first .
However a simple code converting RGB to color textures after merging could solve this issue and shorter the long processing time … right now the RGB of POP3 is as good as the textures … so easy thing to do .