I needed to scan a complex-shaped piece of a car’s interior for a home project. I’m currently making a papier-mâché mold, and while it dries, I decided yesterday to assemble a 3d scanner. It took an hour to create the scanner. It consists of a rotating platform (bearing) on which the camera (phone) captures the object from 360 degrees. This is a prototype; I’ll make a proper one later. For the test object, I chose a wooden mount from an easel.
My ancient 3D scanner gave me 500 photos from all sides, each with a resolution of 2160×2440. The processing was done on COLMAP (feature extractor, exhaustive matcher, mapper) and then on openMVS (reconstruction, triangulation, localization, refining, texture application). It took about 10 hours. I probably went overboard with the number of photos – for a 360-degree view, half of 500 would have been enough. There are artifacts due to the shooting being only in one plane. In the second version of the scanner, I will make the phone movable along a curved guide, and the object will be shot from different planes.
The scanner itself mainly consists of:
– a bearing
– a box
– packaging from a laptop
– packaging from a smartwatch
– kitchenware
– a pencil sharpener as a counterweight to the phone, so it doesn’t tilt the box due to the weight of the phone
– an iPhone 12 Pro Max. This is, actually, the most expensive component
This is what I ended up with. I’m also including a photo of the model itself for comparison. There’s also a video here where I rotate it.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 