Ditch the LPs and build your own 3D scanner
posted Mar 18th 2010 10:00am by Mike Szczysfiled under: misc hacks
Find yourself an old record player, a laser level, and a digital scanner and you can build a 3D scanner. That’s what [Rob] did. The camera and laser level are mounted on the turntable for steady rotation. The camera captures the vertical laser line traveling around the room by recording 30 fps at a resolution of 640×480. This data is then translated into a Blender 3D file via a Python script and the Python Image Library. You can scan a whole room or just a small object. The face above is the result of this image capture after a bit of processing. [Rob] found this worked best in the dark and when scanning surfaces that are not reflective.
Make sure you also check out the camera-and-projector scanning method.
This has been done a number of times, but is still a cool project. One suggestion I’ve seen, for scanning shinny objects (as the summary implies, shinny objects cause the laser line to scatter and mess up the scan) you can coat the object in a thin dusting of something like talcum powder to provide a non-reflective surface without covering over much of the object’s detail. I suppose spray paint could be used too, but it’s more permanent.