3d scanning with LiDar enabled phones - tips?

General Forums Off-topic Chat
#1

This is specific to iOS for now (because that’s what I have), but I’m happy leaving it ambiguous for others that might have the the Samsung Note20.
I’ve scanned a few things with the “3d Scanner App” (good job coming up with the name on that one team) for a few scans. It does pretty good. It’s great for single room scans. They didn’t do a great job limiting memory I think because it lets you scan more than the phone can actually texture. It just crashes when you go to try and texture it. But hey, it’s free and it works.

I haven’t had good luck Finding other apps out there. I know Canvas does it a bit, but they have an odd pay method, and it’s really only meant for scanning rooms. I’ve found the scans are only accurate to about a half inch anyway, and the tolerance gets worse as it gets bigger. If you do a scan that’s really fine, then it Says that it’s accurate to 5mm? No idea if that’s true.

I’m wondering if any of you know of anything else out there. Even if it just gives me point cloud data from the lidar sensor. I’d love to be able to capture something like a pen. Understandably, it won’t be a Good scan. I just want it to Not be truncated. I wanted to scan a tent for a reference model. The tent overall was fine. But it truncated the poles completely.

I assume there are limitations of the LiDar resolution. But if the app did a combination of LiDar scanning with photogrammetry then it could come up with better results. I am just having a difficult time Finding apps that actually make use of the LiDar. All the searches I’m finding are mostly older photogrammetry ones. Some of those worked quite well also, like Display.land (which no longer works).

I’m just wondering if there is something that will give me All of the data. This app will give me point cloud data, but it’s still the “cleaned up” version. I’d like it to give me all the noise as well. We are better than most computer software at finding shapes inside noisy point clouds…for now.

Any other apps to try? I’m happy paying for something (one time fee only since I am paying for it personally) if it actually works well.

#2

I’ve been using Heges, since I downloaded it a year or two back to try out scanning with the Face ID scanner or regular photogrammetry. It’s been updated to support the LIDAR scanner as well on devices that have it. It’s a fairly straightforward app, it has the actual scanner, a viewer for the scans, and the ability to export STL or PLY files to a cloud service to move them off your phone. And that’s it.

I do wish the “color” and “range” sliders were explained a bit better. They don’t have a scale listed on them in the app, and I can’t find anything on the app’s web page about what they do exactly.

#3

Can it do mocap of Moving things??

#4

Btw, did anyone hear of THIS? How does it compare to iphone LIDAR? :

#5

Yes, but that’s very app dependent on what you can do with it. The only app I looked into only applied it to characters. I’d be interested in hands as well.
But if you want to do that, you’re better off using a kinect, since there is already decent software for it. And for hands, there are some tools for the intel realsense, but a bit more limited.
And honestly, computer software has gotten good enough, if you actually want mocap of a character, just doing it with video is pretty decent. But that’s really only for Really basic rigs. Like, early 2000s video game type rigs. Feet, but no toes. Hands, but no fingers. And really only a single back bone.