Do-it-yourself 3D Scanning

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Sebastian Korczak built his own 3D scanner with Blender, a line laser and an old recordplayer. I love these kind of projects!

Sebastian writes:

I decided to execute my old idea of 3D scanner. I was surprised when I realized that digital camera, linear laser and Blender are enough for fast scanning of large objects with good precision. How it works? Cheap camera and linear laser (from simple laser level) are rotating about vertical axis, then python script is processing recorded video and calculating scanned points coordinates.

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    • Vending

      really cool! -this plus a point cloud mesher + tesselation could just be wonderful er.. great :D for quick mesh generation :)

    • G7Pro

      I hate these kinds of projects. Makes me feel so dumb. ;) Seriously though very cool. Good on ya’

    • Johntathan Endland

      Haha! That’s awesome! I always planned on making something like this XD

    • nemesis

      Brilliant.

      I am going to try this.

    • chubaso

      This is brilliant and cheap soloution for 3d scanning. Must be perfect for recreating real enviroments for compositing 3d and video (camera tracking & co).

      greetings
      chubaso

    • Jordan

      Those are some sexy data points. I’d love to try something like this when I have a laser pointer.

    • Alexander Blank

      Oh god that’s a brilliant idea!

    • http://www.dynavisionfx.com Bart Robinson – VFX Artist

      So… Where’s the python script?

    • http://www.blender3d.no Bjørn

      I tried doing this or something similar once, and generated nice data-points but gave up because of time problems before being able to connect the data-points into useable meshes. Great work tho, good that people invent new things using blender, thumbs up:D

    • Vending
    • increment

      guys,

      to create meshes out of point clouds: checkout the open-source tool meshlab: http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

      best,
      simon

    • http://www.benjamindbailey.com/ banor

      Yep. Found this weeks ago. Cool stuff, man!

    • http://www.benjamindbailey.com/ banor

      And actually he is creating a point cloud, if I understand correctly.

    • http://www.youtube.com/robbielosee Robbie Losee

      Now that’s something an iPod can’t do. Sweet!

    • lujomu

      Unrelated, but this reminds me on Radiohead’s video for the song ‘House of Cards’:
      http://code.google.com/intl/de-AT/creative/radiohead/

      They even released the point cloud data for people to play with!

    • http://www.aktasway.com Akta

      Genius!

    • Seb

      A portrait of a geek’s bedroom and the geek himself. How quaint. Err I can’t believe i just said that. This is a really cool project. Just a profoundly uninteresting choice of subjects for the demo!

    • Nixon

      wow what a great setup..thats really inventive ideas…great work!
      looks freaked out ..hope its as much fun operating it as it looks ..
      impressive!!! thumbsup

    • http://3d-synthesis.com ROUBAL

      Very interesting method, and good result ! Congratulations !

    • http://www.toomuchcookies.net Omar

      it would be nice, if someone came up with an areal fringe projection (or structured light projection) project that imports its data directly into blender.

    • tud

      Hey, this is awesome. It’s great that people are trying to do this.
      Anyhow, for the mesh triangulation and what not, there was another university student that tried to do something similar; using only webcam. By reading his paper, he explains how he makes the point cloud to a mesh.
      It was on blendernation at
      http://www.blendernation.com/turn-your-webcam-into-a-3d-scanner/
      The first link should have his paper at the top.

    • http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com ALoopingIcon

      Another source of info on the issue of meshing a point cloud (e.g. converting it into a triangulated surface) is explained in this tutorial (again using MeshLab)

      http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com/2009/09/meshing-point-clouds.html

    • Grzeslaw

      Ej, no spoko sprawa! Fajnie, ze powstaja takie rzeczy. Respect for concept!

    • http://3615malife.over-blog.com TiPi

      very nice way of scanning, but once again, “WIndows Only” Stuff :/ (Python Image Libs)

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @TiPi: if someone does a private experiment you can hardly expect him to put in the time to make it cross-platform, can you?

    • pixnolve

      some people are just to good.
      Do you sleep at night, do you have a life?
      This is crazy man.

      Come you have got to do a video tutorial you can’t just let that lying here!

    • http://en.myinventions.pl/ Sebastian Korczak

      Hi everybody,

      I sleep at night, I have interesting live, so many ideas, day in Poland has standard 24hours, I think about 3d scanner full integrated with Blender this year, but now I’m working with my thesis…
      Take care and happy blending!

    • Aristocrata

      Where can I buy that line laser?

    • Afief

      @TiPi: The Python Image Library is cross platform, he just linked to the windows version which is probably what he used.

      What I want to know is where the script that converts the sequence of images into a point cloud is!