Super low cost 3D scanner: DAVID

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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I just saw on Digg an amazing new piece of freeware that uses a webcam and strait line of laser light to make 3D models. It only works on Windows, so I haven’t been able to test it as I am on my ubuntu box, but from the screenshots it looks quite easy to do. You hold the laser and “brush” the line over the object a few times, and then the software produces the 3D model. This is great news for people like me who have trouble modelling organic or complex stuff. The homepage is here… http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/rob/david.htmI

I tried searching to see if this news was already posted, but I didn’t come up with anything.
I also don’t know if you can export the 3D models.

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Nice find!

I will be bookmarking this.

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Wow, seriously cool! Since they are at a university maybe they will make it open source.

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This news was posted in ‘Other Software’ a while ago.
I have tried it myself with a home handiman laser level and it works well but there is not very much detail to be had without getting a sufficiently narrow laser line from better equipment or maybe using a cylindrical lens to focus it better.
Export is .obj which Blender imports well.

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mh thats is nice, we have to see if we can use that for the 3d department here.

claas

6

So cool. Thanks for posting here.

I have an Olympus camera with 3 mega pixels; I wonder if that will help with the quality of the details.

A lot of times projects like these fade to forgotten after the initial release. Have to hope the 360’ version will be released before that happens.

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Holy crap, infinitely reciprocating sidebar frame cascades.

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Hopefully this means that a freeware Motion Capture software will someday be on the way.:smiley:

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There is freeware motioncapture, but it’s optical. still pretty good though. I think its DGeeMe or something.

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Hopefully this means that a freeware Motion Capture software will someday be on the way.

This isn’t motion capture. With the dots to use it should be easy enough to code though. I might make one in fact.

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Whoa…could you post the link?!:eek:

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That would be awesome.

Would it be open source? :smiley:

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sweet :slight_smile:
I will be watching this software with great anticipation

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sorry, double post

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Ever heard of google?:slight_smile:
http://www.geeware.com/

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Of course! There’s no way it would be good enough to sell anyway, hehe. It’s fairly easy, just a bit of trig really.

  1. Find points (use bright dots to make it easy).
  2. Find location in 3d space using 2+ cameras.
  3. track.

Thats it, as far as I can see.

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I have been playing with the software and am keeping track of my progress here… in case anyone else finds it helpfull
http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/index.php?id=46
I’ll be updating the page later on as I get better results

18

Anybody had success with a sony handycam via firewire? or for that matter any firewire device? Im thinking its something to do with XP SP2, will go back to SP1 asap, cause too many issues, but needed it to install visual basic.

MicWit

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MicWit, You need a device that has WDM drivers… I don’t know if your handycam comes with those?

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Yes it says wdm only on their sight. My Olympus doesn’t have that and won’t work. Reading macouno’s review it may be ok though. I also have a nice USB video capture for a NTSC camcorder that will go up to 720 pixels and makes it possible to use the large sperical lenses. Hope that will play one of these day when I can set up a stage.

Hey, mac. Nice review. Thanks for putting that up. That laser scan looks like the scans we were seeing in the late 80’s early 90’s. Amazing. I’d guess you could do a face poking out of a wall kind of an effect too. heh. My only question was what in the wold is a matryoshka. And now that I have googled that, why? Kidding. Hope no one minds that you drilled holes in their shelves.