How to scan an item into a 3D format? XBOX 360 Kinect? Suggestions welcome...

For the book, I used both the FARO scanner that's best for museum curation because it captures full-color images, as well as the Creaform Go!Scan which provided excellent physical body images of people. both of those are commercial systems, so their use resulted in the highest resolution output, but from hobbyist level equipment, the Kinect did a decent job of mapping my office, all of the stuff on my desktop, my hat on a rack, etc. I have seen the results from hand-build DAVID laser scanners and the MakeBot scanner Bre Pettis put out, and both of those do a fine job for smaller items that fit in their scan space.

I also had great luck using photos from a common camera (I use the same Nikon to shoot pics of the kids usually) together with photogrammetry software. I had similar results from the free "123D Catch" from AutoDesk and the low-cost commercial PhotoScan from Agisoft. Agisoft's products just made stitching the photos together a little easier between the two. The image above is a capture of the "Oscillation Overthruster" from the movie prop for Buckaroo Banzai using the Agisoft Photoscan package.The resulting OBJ file can be translated into STL for printing, and carries the complete full color details as well as the manifold shape definition.

Kirk Hausman

Thanks Kirk!  I will have to look into these!

One thing to be aware of when using Autodesk 123D is it does not like reflective surfaces at all.  I guarantee you will have to do a couple of runs before you get something that is usable.  The good news is you can send it to Autodesk's cloud service so its not so irritating when you waited 5 hours on your machine to find out its unusable.  Still a good product to use just something the user has to be aware of.

Nate

Nate is very correct with regards to reflective surfaces - and the same is true whether you are using photogrammetry, laser scanners, structured light scanners, or IR scanners like the XBox. An easy way to capture the shape of a reflective surface is to cover it with an opaque medium - from paint to powder, anything that renders the surface opaque to light will allow it to be captured into a 3D reference model.

And, yes, for photogrammetry, the AutoDesk Cloud processing is much nicer than running the same process on your own machine's resources. The rendering I posted before took almost 8 hours using a dedicated i7 Quad-core Ivy Bridge CPU, 32 GB RAM and a NVidia 740 GPU.

Kirk

I'm using Makerbot's scanner.  My original plan was to use an X-Box Kinect as you mentioned (I have 3 of them that I'm tinkering with at the moment), and I still hope to get that done.  There's a pretty good open source community using Kinect devices for lots of different things.  The Makerbot scanner is listed at $799.00 plus shipping.  It's pretty good, though you have to get the lighting right for it to calibrate.  www.makerbot.com - also note that they discount the scanner if you buy a 3D printer.  Somewhere in the documentation or on the forum I think, I read that they are using a well documented process for converting the point cloud from the scan into an OBJ format.  I haven't looked for it yet, but that's where I would go in order to make a similar scanner from Kinect devices.  The other option is multiple digital photos stitched together in a 360deg (inward) panorama.  Not sure how well that works, but many are doing that.

Kinect Fusion is an app that lets you build up dense point clouds from Kinect data to create printable models. The Kinect SDK including Fusion is free from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188670.aspx

Many of the popular 3D scanning tools for Kinect are becoming for-pay commercial products, where they were free open-source offerings at first. A few like ReconstructMe seem to limit commercial use to their licensed products but allow personal use in other cases (ReconstructMe | Real Time 3D Scanning Software), while Scanect remains at a lower-cost than many alternatives (Skanect 3D Scanning Software By Occipital » The Easiest Way To 3D Scan With the Structure Sensor and Kinect-like Depth S…) . One of the products I have seen demonstrated at events is the KScan3d package (3D Mesh Generation with KScan3D software and Kinect) although I have not tested this one personally.

The artist Lee Smith who put me onto Photogrammetry at his Infinite Realities studio (Infinite-Realities - 3D Scanning and Character Creation) has a blog that talks about 3D model capture of living subjects that may help give you some ideas of techniques. His rig is a bit nicer than most of us will have, of course:

Kirk