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MAS.863/4.140/6.9020
Lleyton Elliott

Week 4 Assignment Part 2: 3D Scan an Object
See Part 1 of Week 4 Here!

I did this week's assignment using the USB-connected RGB/LiDAR camera and turntable attached to the lab computer in the conference room of EDS. I initially tried to scan my glasses, but it looked a little suspect in the setup phase:

glasses setup

I decided to give it a try but soon learned why 3D scanning glasses is a terrible idea. I confirmed my suspicions that the semi-reflective glass and overall small structures with low contrast were detrimental to the scan with Anthony, who also noted that the camera in EDS isn't that great.

glasses failure

I decided to use a roll of yellow tape I found in the lab instead. I did the first scan with just the tape sitting alone on the turntable, but was disappointed that it couldn't really capture the curvature on top and especially on the bottom. There was some other weird noise around the scan as well.

tape alone

Anthony said that using a crumpled paper towel was a crude but effective way to fix these issues somewhat. The homogeneity of the tape from multiple angles confuses the camera, but the chaotic outcome of crumpling a paper towel is asymmetrical enough that the camera can reconstruct the 3D image much better with it as an additional reference.

tape on towel

I was much happier with the way this one looked!

Thoughts, Lessons, and Takeaways:

3D scanning was fun, though the printing part of this week took precedent. Reading about the way the camera reconstructed the image was really interesting, and I got to see the effects of this process by analyzing the difference between the scans of the tape with and without the paper towel underneath. Very cool!