Parel Design Blog

When my friend Eric Lagman does something he does it 150%.
I sent an email around with my rough scan and he went ahead and purchased the David Scan Software and relayed his setup.
This is his experience:

"The web cam and laser I already had. The calibration panels are white melamine, but gator board would work also. Those panels can be scaled to as large as a plotter will print. One guy scanned a boat hull by painting the pattern at the corners of a warehouse wall. There is a free version of the software, but you need to take it into another free software called meshlab to merge all the scans from rotating the object. The software that comes with the scanning software does such a good job of merging that I went ahead and just bought it.

The better the camera and laser the higher resolution scan you can get. Better camera=higher resolution at high frame rate. Better laser=Thin as possible and bright as possible. This guy has done some amazing scans of toy action figures that are extremely detailed.
http://www.david-laserscanner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=681&highlight=figure

Here is his equipment.

Camera = 890.00 http://www.theimagingsource.com/en/topics/firewire-cameras-at-the-imaging-source/

Laser = $234.00 http://shop.david-laserscanner.com/

But there are guys like this getting nice scans with a $100.00 webcam and $100.00 laser http://www.david-laserscanner.com/wiki/user_page/magweb
I would be happy with the level of detail he got.

I will be scanning a Ren model of the Ridigid 12v that had clay patched onto the handle area to fine tune the comfort of the grip area. This can then be taken into Solidworks so that the existing parametric model can be adjusted to fit over the “tracing mesh” that the scanner output. I will let you know how it turns out with the current equipment I have at home."