iPhone 3D Scanning vs Professional 3D Scanner

If it makes you feel any better, I value this video higher than the Tshirt cannon....

This is exactly what a good YouTube channel should be - delivering engaging, non clickbatey content about things viewers didn’t realise were interesting. Thanks Matt.

I work in one of those professional 3D scanner companies in an engineering position. You are the first hobbyist on YouTube that I've seen who said "professional tools are obviously much better but probably not worth it for hobbyists", instead of the "iphone does the same or better, don't bother with professional 3D scanners" which seems to be the consensus. Thank you for being objective and actually taking the time and putting in the effort to form an educated opinion instead of spewing clickbaity garbage.

The shop I'm at got an EinScan for dirt cheap like 2500$ used. To be honest will never mess with a cheap scanner again. Mainly because the details are unmatched and the fact it can scan colors and even can pick up the masking marks from a paint job from 20 years ago.

Happy New Year, Matt! Thanks for all your great content in 2021. Looking forward to another fun, exciting, dangerous year of your projects. All hail the algorithm!

A couple of things that I have considered doing when I get around to scanning something. Make scale markers. These are things that will show up in the scan that are of a precise known size, usually a small cube and a square frame you can place on or around the object. Set up a frame of some sort around and over the object that you can use to steady your hand while scanning. The rafters in a garage might do the trick if you tie a line that you can hold with the scanning hand so you can pan in a stable arc. Turn tables are a must.

4:56 Put a few markers on the extremes of the object, then scale it in software after scanning. You can even average your multiple scaling references to get sub polygon accuracy.

Thanks for the comparison. I've been passively interested in scanning kit car bodies and making form-fitting body panels and I learned quite a bit from your video. It's reassuring to know that I don't need a pro scanner for the kind of project I want to do.

Well, we saw it. We saw the R1000RR engine and now we want the video ASAP. Can we call your new/old car a Bonda? :P

One thing that can make your Revopoint work a lot better is getting one of those stabilized selfie-stick things. Once I started using one of those, I discovered that the quality of my scans improved dramatically.

I appreciate your content so very much. I find your videos so compelling, not because they are comedic genius but because they are so information dense. You give info how you got the info why you got the info make a quip that makes me chuckle repeat like 50 times and the video is less than 20 minutes long. Any other youtuber conveying as much info as you do would take 45 minutes and would need a part 2.

The Pop 2 looks like a big improvement on the Pop although it looks like it still has issues with certain surfaces but it comes with stickers and you can use a temporary spray on covering to make scanning easier.

As always a great video. I love your storytelling with the simple cards with text for the sections in the video. The themed music for certain parts of the video is also amazing.

I like your projects! Never thought of using a scanner. But I KNEW you would present the subject well... so here I am.

The good thing is, people like you buying, using, and giving feedback on things like this,, are paving the road for future products to work better.

FWIW with some surface treatment (developer spray, baby powder, etc) and a decent SLR you can get more detail out of photogrammetry than most pro scanners. Dimensional accuracy depends on the quality of your scale reference but I get very accurate results when I compare caliper measurements to scan dimensions. The point here is to say, there are a lot of middle ground options between phone scan and pro scan tool. Quality becomes less of a differentiating factor and its more about how much effort and time it takes to get your scan result. Processing images in good software like reality capture (expensive) requires a decently powerful computer(also expensive) and a lot of time.

For what it's worth, I found this video 10x more fascinating than a t-shirt cannon. Have you put any thought/research into Kinect-based solutions? I know those have been around for a decade now and are likely very far from state-of-the-art but this seems like a problem that is 10% hardware 90% software/algorithm, and I'm curious how the Kinect's community solutions compare to commercial ones.

Great video! I'm obviously one of the eight people who are very interested in 3D Scanners, but I am also just a tinkerer who doesn't want to pay 10.000 USD or more for a descent scanner. I made about two scans with my Revopoint with one of them being just about usable, but the part was so simple I could have just measured it with calipers and now the scanner is collecting dust. I hope there will be something available soon for around 1.000 USD, that would be great. Please let us know if you find a scanner in that price range.

Hey man, great videos! I'm a geomatics engineer with a masters degree in optical metrology, specializing in digital imaging systems. This topic is RIGHT in my wheel house! First, great summary, there's very little I would add in the broad strokes. On the topic of photogrammety, I have mixed feelings. For your use case, its would be possible to get sub-mm 3D models, but I doubt it would be worth your time. To do so, you would need a decent camera with a fixed focal length (i.e. at least a manual focus, no auto focus), you would need to calibrate the camera (it's possible to do that yourself, but it is very finicky, and easy to trick yourself you did a good job), and you would need to some kind of reliable scale reference. For us geos, we would probably use a total station to survey in a couple targets at the extreme extents of the measurement volume. For better results you your scanners, you probably want more "registration features," which could be those white dots, but I personally have used ping ping balls with great success. They're light-weight, highly spherical, a consistent radius, and if you hit them with a bit of matte white, also have consistent illumination across their surface. You could probably hot glue, or even super-glue the on the surface of the engine for you models, then just knock them off when your done. Just be careful not to deform their shape when you glue them, neither through heat, chemistry nor pressure. Also, **until you need to flip you engine over**, adding a nice checker-board pattern to your work bench would greatly improve your feature tracking, with no need for the ping pong balls. It's really important that during a scan, the subject (i.e. the engine) does not move relative to your registration targets (i.e. the check-board or the ping pong balls). You could also put the two together, use the pattern on the bench to scan in each orientation, and use the ping pong balls to register each scan together after you flip it over. Let me know if you have any quetsions. BTW, if you care to read it, I could link you my masters thesis, which features the ping pong balls in chapter 3

Thank you for the review/comparison. These topics are hard to find and the tech is changing all the time, so, thanks for your time and experience!