3D Scanning Tests: three kings
Posted February 19th, 2016 by Warren Blyth 
We’ve been doing tests with 3 popular 3D scanners here at work.
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(We don’t have the money to buy these sorts of things, yet. Were able to borrow MakerBot and David from another department when they weren’t using them, and the Artec scan is from a brief demo – given by some folks at DigitalScan3D.com, who came down from Portland.)
I think Artec Spider is clearly the winner. Despite David’s crazy high triangle count, you can see that it put flaps of garbage in the armpits and weird ballooning on the unseen parts under feet and hands. Basically David seems to have problems with parts that aren’t seen in some of it’s scans(*- or we just needed to do many more scans?). We can clean it up in Maya, but it’s a notable bummer when thinking about speed.
What really isn’t reflected here is how much better Artec’s hardware/software bundle seems to be. It’s handheld, scans multiple times per seconds, and easily combines it’s hundreds of scans to a mesh in just 2 or 3 minutes. Makerbot’s and David’s overall scanning periods take closer to half an hour, and have fewer options for clean up and output (*- maybe. Still learning and experimenting).
For example, this David result came from just 16 scans, on a machine-controlled turntable, with each individual scan taking around 15 seconds (between each rotation of table).
Though, to be fair, Nick has run the MakerBot and David tests, and these are pretty much his first results with each. He’s already getting better with practice on the David. Everyone seems to have left MakerBot behind as a mistake, but I’m hoping to do some further tests (and it may have new improved software? and may benefit from combining multiple passes?). Meanwhile, The Artec scan was performed by a demo expert.
We’re going to do a lot more tests, and hope to acquire an Artec Spider if we can get approval. but. Just thought it’d be nice to share what we’ve done so far.
+ Another, better, David scan:
