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David Laser Scanner


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Not sure if you guys know about this one. It's basically a simple system to use a $25 laser level from the hardware store as a 3D scanner. I've been wanting to try it but lately even $25 is a lot of money.

http://www.david-laserscanner.com/

A while back they did a whole episode of SYSTM on it:

http://revision3.com/systm/laserscan

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  • 1 year later...

I finally got around to picking up a laser level and I'm getting ready to do my first scan. My camera's all calibrated, I just need to wait until the sun goes down so the laser light is visible enough.

20110521170605373.th.jpg

Here is the level I bought, I'll share how well it works.

http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-100375599/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053

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A friend of mine has a David laser setup.

One problem is that the Red Laser is not fine or bright enough. You need to scan in a dark room. You probably need a green laser to get a clean scan. Overall though- great value for money eventhough there is a lot of manual cleanup.

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I found some tricks to improve my first test and also got a different camera to use but I'm not sure how good it will be since its old. I'm looking at getting a Kinect for mocap and I'm starting to wonder if that might be better for scanning.

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Hi Phil,

I have been using the DAVID program for a while and one of the great features is that there are two settings you can manually setup for the scan. The first is the texture camera acquisition and the scan camera acquisition. Both these settings use the camera setting function.

What this means is that even if you have lights on in the background, you can set the scanning camera acquisition setting to darker ( bringing down the brightness, exposure ) while the texture camera setting remains at the original setting. The program will remember these for the whole of the scanning procedure

I hope this makes sense and clarifies it a bit more.

Cliveb

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The free version cuts the resolution in half for the saved model, you also have no access to the Shapefusion part of the app, which stitches together all of your scans. Although, as cliveB said above you can apparently do that in Meshlab.

This page has a chart showing the difference between free and pay:

http://www.david-laserscanner.com/?section=Buy

Unfortunately $280 is way out of my price range for something like this.

Edit: I found this nice tutorial on combining the scanned meshes in Meshlab.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g9Hap4rX0k

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