Week 8: 3D Printing and Scanning

This week I tried out a couple of different scanning apps so that I can understand the basics of scanning and then using Meshmixer to repair, fix, and cover up any mistakes I made in the scanning phase.

First off I did some research on good photogrammetry apps for the iPhone that was free, as though we were recommended to use Trio, I thought trying out another app would benefit me. So then I found an app called Capture: 3D Scan Anything.

The app looked to work well as a 3D scanner, and to test it out, I did an initial test of the software, as seen in the picture below.

The app seemed to work well, but it was very sensitive when it came to its scanning which was forewarned by a notification of how to properly use the app. For this exploration into scanning, I decided to scan my UE Megaboom speaker. The speaker is illustrated below.

Initially, I expected the scanning process to be easy, but the app did not function the way that I expected it to. I recon, scanning an object is much easier when done in an open and well-lit area, both are things that I do not have access to. Keeping the camera on the object is very necessary, but the kicker was that I needed to use my phone’s selfie camera. The reason I had to use the inner camera of my phone was that the Capture app which I used relied on using depth capture, which is a feature my phone has with only the selfie camera instead of the out-facing camera. This led to a number of failed attempts as shown below.

After many failed attempts, I was getting better at keeping the right distance between the phone and the speaker, and was getting better results the more I tried. I kept going until I got a couple of decent models that had an almost complete mesh.

I then followed the steps of the app to export the file into an .obj file. I assumed that this meant that I would be able to open it in Meshmixer, but I was mistaken and got an error after every attempt to importing the file.

After doing some research, I found out that the Capture App did not export a mesh for me, it instead exported a point cloud. This meant that I needed to use another program to convert the point cloud to mesh, which is where I used Meshlab. I found a tutorial that supposedly fixed this issue, converting a point cloud into a mesh. This was notably a video that was recommended by the creators of the Capture app.

I followed the steps to the tutorial but was met with an issue where my Meshlab program would crash after selecting the Screened Poisson Filter as recommended by the tutorial.

After doing a lengthy amount of research, I decided to stop working with this app, and move on to the app that was recommended, hoping it would be more streamlined than the Capture: 3D Scan Anything route.

After downloading the Trnio app, I found that it is an app that does not rely on the depth camera feature of the iPhone, so I could much more easily perform the scanning process with the outer camera. Although it was easier to scan generally with the Trnio app, it was still relatively difficult to scan my speaker due to the lack of space and good lighting I have access to.

The Trnio app has two main scanning methods from what I found, which they call Object and ArKnit scanning. I tried to use both to try and find out which one worked better/more efficiently, but I found that it would take time to fully process the scan. For me personally, the processing duration was 2-3 hours per scan. This was very frustrating to start, but when the wait was over I found that one of the scans failed with no reason attached to it, while the other was scanned incorrectly, where the cylinder-shaped speaker was flat like a disk. With examples of this below.

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Scan Attempts OBJ and PLY Files