3D scanning with Polycam

I used the app Polycam to 3D scan things.

At first, I wanted to scan my own hand so I could make a laptop stand for my desk in the shape of my hands. Polycam’s interface automatically snaps a series of photos which are fed into its model. I tried to hold my hand very still while rotating my phone around it, and I ended up with this mesh:

However, this didn’t turn out so well, as I was unable to get good shots of the bottom of my hand. The mesh does not capture anything other than the top surface of my hand – here is a view of the bottom of the mesh.

I decided to give up on scanning my own hand, as I figured it would be too hard to both hold it still enough and get shots of all possible angles.

Instead I decided to try to scan a flower. After taking 100+ images, here was the resulting mesh:

I used Polycam’s 3D cropping feature to isolate just the flower from the background:

Finally, here was the result: