Resumen

Ha llegado una nueva generación de escáneres 3D, y no están reservados solo para usuarios profesionales con grandes presupuestos. De hecho, muchos de estos nuevos escáneres son cada vez más fáciles de usar, sin necesidad de un ordenador potente para controlar el escaneo. En este seminario web, analizaremos el proceso de escaneo con el Shining3D Einstar VEGA, un escáner 3D "todo en uno". Verá cómo configurar el escaneo, realizarlo y transferirlo a su software CAD.

00:00 I'm Connor here from HPA and welcome to another one of our webinars.
00:03 Today we're going to be looking at the new Einstar Vega 3D scanner.
00:08 So, we're going to have a quick look at the product first and what it's all about.
00:11 I'm going to show you how to get set up and working with it.
00:14 Then we're going to take a scan and progress through the software, processing the scan and then up to the point essentially where we can export a mesh and then bring that into our CAD software.
00:28 So, we are going to be making more content with this scanner and some other ones coming up as well so keep an eye out for that.
00:34 Before we get into talking about that, I do just want to flick onto my computer screen here and we are running a giveaway at the moment for this 3D scanner.
00:45 So, there's in this case actually one day left to enter.
00:48 I'll get Jayden to drop the link to this page into the chat so you can go along for your chance to win.
00:54 Doesn't matter where you are in the world, anyone can enter.
00:58 So, the total value here is $4500 US and you'll get the scanner along with the HPA VIP package.
01:08 So, we do courses on all sorts of things but included in that would be CAD for motorsport design as well as a 3D scanning course so you'll be able to get the most out of this scanner that you've won.
01:22 But we've also got a whole range of courses of course on engine building, tuning, wiring, suspension setup, you name it, it's there.
01:31 So, again go along, one day left for your chance to enter to win this 3D scanner.
01:38 So, before we get into talking about the Vega, I do think it's worth mentioning the original Einstar from Shining 3D first.
01:49 This is what I would say would have been probably the first cheap or relatively affordable scanner.
01:57 They were about $1000 US when they came out, now I think they're down to about $750.
02:02 It was the first really affordable or accessible one that worked really well.
02:07 We tested and compared this to three other scanners around a similar price point and we basically found that this was our recommendation at the end of that battle for working on automotive projects.
02:21 So, of course compared to the professional scanner we have as well which is about 10 times the price of this, there are some kind of drawbacks around accuracy and things like that but actually in some cases this scanner does work better, especially for taking large scans of engine bays or body panels or things like that, or the entire vehicle.
02:45 It's a lot more efficient, fast and easy.
02:48 The only really downside I found with this scanner was around the amount of cables that you required, it needed to be plugged into a power supply and also your computer and then the computer that you are using to run it had to be quite grunty.
03:04 So, we'll come back to that towards the end but I'll show you that basically the Vega solves a lot of those issues.
03:14 This is a structured light scanner and it has a huge field of view and working range so like I said before it's really efficient and easy to use.
03:24 And the Vega is quite similar.
03:26 So, I'll just put that back over here and we'll start talking about our focus today which is the Vega.
03:35 So, I might just be able to jump under the overhead here, might be a slightly better approach.
03:42 So, this is the Vega, as you can see at the moment it's plugged into my laptop but it does not need to be.
03:49 This is essentially a wireless 3D scanner, it's a standalone unit and it has all the onboard processing and everything and it has a screen on the back so you can basically do almost everything you need to do from this scanner without even plugging it into the computer.
04:09 At the moment we've just got it in this kind of silicon case it comes with because we use it in the workshop a lot so it's nice to have it protected but it's a pretty nice finished unit with a really good resolution screen on the back.
04:23 So, basically I guess the main point of it is the convenience, there's less kind of setup with it, you don't have to plug it into your laptop, it's very flexible in the way you use it and from my experience that basically means that you're going to be more likely to grab it and start taking a scan.
04:44 Just with less messing around to get set up basically, you end up using it more and kind of get more value out of the product.
04:54 So, the other main point that I wanted to mention was that there are these two scanning modes so it might actually be better if I just jump onto my laptop screen here and I'm actually screen casting the screen on the Vega to this so you'll be able to see a little bit better.
05:16 But there's these two scanning modes that you can see up the top there, it's HD and fast.
05:21 And that kind of opens up that range of use a little bit more as well, kind of makes you be able to cover all bases from within just one scanner.
05:32 I would say the fast is probably the most similar approach to the original Ionstar that we just talked about.
05:41 It's got a massive field of view, it's actually even bigger with this and it's really good for taking scans of large areas really quickly.
05:50 Things like engine bays and so on if you want to design some engine mounts for mounting an engine for example.
05:57 It does lack a little bit in the resolution side of things but we'll get into that a little bit more detail just in a moment so you'll be able to see.
06:06 And the other mode, the HD mode is a lot more precise.
06:11 It still uses a similar kind of infrared structured light technology but it is a little bit different.
06:19 Rather than VC SEL, it's MEMS which is like a mirror based setup so it can tune the lasers for the structured light a little bit better but it's not really like a laser scanner system like what you'd see in their latest product, the Ionstar Rigel which we'll discuss again at the end of the webinar.
06:41 But basically that HD mode is going to be good for a lot smaller parts, things like engine blocks or actually even probably a lot smaller than this, things like brake calipers and so on but if you're talking about the project I just mentioned before where you're mounting an engine in the engine bay and you're designing some engine mounts, I'd probably scan the engine bay using the fast mode and then I'd use the HD mode to scan the engine block to pick up on the bolt holes and so on for mounting the engine.
07:13 So, I'll just reiterate that, it can kind of cover a lot of bases so it's a good kind of all in one scanner for whatever projects you might be working on.
07:26 But yeah we'll get away from talking so much about the product and actually show it in use, so we're going to scan something now and kind of progress through to bring that model into our CAD software.
07:38 I will just say if you have any questions come up during any of this, just feel free to ask them in the chat and at the end I'll do my best to answer them.
07:46 So, what we're going to do here is we're going to scan this engine block, or half an engine block, it's from a FA20 out of a GT86 or BRZ or Scion FRS.
07:59 So, we're going to scan it, I've already scanned it with the HD mode but we'll do it again.
08:04 We'll scan it with the fast mode as well and then we'll be able to kind of compare those two modes and just get a bit of a feel for how the scanner works and how you use the software and so on.
08:14 So, at the end we'll bring those two scans into our CAD software and we'll just kind of compare the accuracy between the results from those two modes and see if there's actually a benefit to using the HD mode over the fast mode.
08:29 So, yeah we'll get straight into it.
08:32 At the moment I am just plugged into my laptop, that is just for the purposes of this live stream that we're doing.
08:39 But I could completely disconnect and it wouldn't be any issue, I've just got one kind of USB cable plugged in there.
08:47 And I'm also just screen casting this so you can see on my computer screen a little bit bigger rather than me trying to hold it under the overhead here.
08:56 So, we'll just get into it and we'll use the fast mode here first.
09:03 So, if I just click the button on the far right, which you probably won't be able to see on my screen if I kind of show you with the mouse here, that's just the advanced setting button and we can see we have some options here in terms of setting up our scan for whatever project we might be scanning.
09:22 Obviously, this is an object, we're not scanning a person for portrait mode.
09:27 The resolution here, we are in the range of 1 to 2.5 millimetres.
09:34 We could up that to 0.5 to 1 millimetres or get that kind of a lot lower, even down to 10 millimetres.
09:44 That would be really fast and obviously make quite a small file that would be really quick to process and so on.
09:49 We'll just keep it in the middle there for this fast setting, we'll just use the default settings for each of the modes and that will give us a kind of better comparison about what they're all about.
10:00 And we could also acquire the texture.
10:02 I'll show you a scan now where I've acquired the texture, just really quickly if I jump into this other little button down the bottom here.
10:14 That's just some scans that we've been playing around with in the workshop.
10:18 So, we've actually got a Group B car which is pretty crazy in our workshop at the moment, Ford RS200.
10:27 It's a bit of a treat, almost a million dollar car probably sitting in there.
10:32 Just before I came over this morning to film this I took a scan of the front and on the fast mode to be honest this probably took me about three minutes.
10:41 In full colour, I'm just zooming in there and you can kind of see, had a bit of trouble picking up the clear lenses on the headlights.
10:53 I didn't do anything to prep the car, obviously don't wanna spray anything onto this extremely expensive car but relatively quickly I was able to pick up the whole front clip here and I'd say I probably would have been able to capture the rest of the outside of the car in maybe within 10 minutes or so.
11:13 So, very impressive and that's like an example of a texture or colour scan there.
11:19 So, we'll just jump back out of that and then we'll jump back into those scan settings and see what else we've got before we start scanning this engine block.
11:33 It just takes a minute to switch between different modes and get set up ready to scan.
11:38 So, we have the alignment modes as well here which is feature alignment, texture alignment or marker alignment and it supports in this fast mode six and 12 millimetre markers.
11:51 So, the 12 millimetre markers are really large and it basically means you can use less of them if you are basing it on marker alignment.
12:01 Just makes it a lot quicker and easier to do for taking really large scans.
12:06 Texture alignment would be based on stickers or colours on the surface, like paint on the outside of a car or like a livery more so.
12:14 And then feature alignment would be really good for something like this engine block which has a lot of geometric features.
12:20 I really like scanning things like engine blocks because they're this nice kind of matte texture that the scanner picks up really well and they have a lot of geometric features for the tracking.
12:32 So, I'm happy with those advanced settings, we'll just leave them as they are.
12:37 And we'll just get straight into it.
12:38 So, we can see the slider along the right hand side of the screen as well, shows I'm too close at the moment.
12:44 And then if I move back a little bit we'll see the scanner start to pick up more data.
12:49 And if I move right back we start to lose it again.
12:51 So, that's pretty typical for most scanners to have something like that.
12:56 And I'll just click the play button there, hold steady and it'll start that scan.
13:03 And when I put my hand down to move the turntable here, it is going to pick up my fingers but that's not going to be too much of an issue.
13:13 Because we can just edit all that out soon.
13:17 So, as you can see we're pretty much getting the whole engine block in frame in one shot.
13:25 And just slowly rotating that around, staying in that zone.
13:36 We're just using a turntable here with some little 3D printed pedestals to make this easier for us.
13:47 And we're just trying to get down into the cylinder boards there a little bit because that's what we're going to use to kind of check the accuracy of these scans in our CAD software soon.
14:02 I won't spend too long doing this just because we've got a little bit to get through in this webinar.
14:08 But basically we're just trying to, as always with 3D scanning, capture the object or the target from all different angles to give the scanner a chance to kind of see it, pick up all the data it needs to, not miss any surfaces.
14:26 So, we can spend a lot of time doing that.
14:30 But I'm pretty happy, I've got a bit there.
14:35 Depending on what I was trying to do with this, if I was trying to get a really solid model of the whole thing I'd spend a lot of time working around.
14:42 So, I'm just going to pause that.
14:45 That's going to take a moment there.
14:50 Just before we move on, well I want to show this screen that we're on at the moment.
14:55 When I pause it I can actually drag this slider down the bottom back and rewind the scan so that's really good if I get to a certain point and I've like accidentally moved my hand into frame and I don't want to include it or if the scan starts to misalign with itself I can just pause it, rewind back a few steps and then continue on from where I left off.
15:15 And that's a big improvement for some of these cheaper scanners because they didn't have that functionality and you'd basically end up at a point where something would go wrong with the scan and then you'd just have to start from scratch and it was super frustrating and time consuming.
15:34 If we do start scanning again on the far left hand side of the screen as well we can just look at the exposure or brightness settings and then also the working range is adjustable here as well so we can basically crop out the background with those settings.
16:05 So, I'll just get rid of those, pause it again, we don't actually need to get any more.
16:11 And then down the side here, down the right hand side, this cross button at the top would delete the scan and this tick button here I can just click through and accept that and move to the next post processing for that scan.
16:29 So, what we've got at the moment is a point cloud so basically, I'll have to do that on here, all the little points in space for the data points that we've picked up here and that's all good but the next stage is meshing so basically turning that into a surface model in some respects of this where that surface is going to be broken down into all these little elements which are mostly going to be triangles, small triangular faces to basically build up the overall model that we're working on so it might be something like a million little triangles to make up, little triangular faces to make up something like that is essentially what the mesh is.
17:15 It's the overall surface model of it broken down into these really small elements.
17:22 So, before we get to that point of meshing, we can just edit the model or the point cloud from here and remove things that we don't need.
17:33 So, there's this little scissors icon on the left hand side here, I can just click that and then I'm into the clipping data mode so from here, I don't wanna do what I just did, if I use this I just deselect what I've selected.
17:55 So, I just wanna, did it again, deselect that.
18:00 So, I've just clicked this little icon here that's going to let me rotate the model and what I'm going to do is essentially just, I could just chop off the bottom of it so if I deselect that I can just click and drag and kinda do that and then use the trash button tool there to remove what I don't need.
18:20 But another way to do it is select part of the engine block and then use this icon here which will basically expand the selection to anything that it's connected to and that's unfortunately still getting some of the table in in this case with it but we can invert that selection and that'll kind of select some of these other parts, a little bit of the inside of the engine but that's okay, delete those.
18:53 We'll just come up here again, turn that off, select everything from there down, delete that and then that's looking pretty good like we've just got the engine block left there now so I'm happy with that, I'll just go complete in the top right corner, confirm, that'll apply those changes and then down the side here on the right hand side we've got this icon here which is basically a very easy approach to it, we just one touch, click and it will create the mesh for us or the button below we can actually come into that and do the mesh settings from here so have a little bit more control over this next step.
19:42 Again, I'm just going to leave the resolution as the default setting here which is pretty high, one millimeter resolution which is not typically what I'd use for an engine block but that's what we're going to use for this fast mode here so it's the recommended parameters, mesh smoothness for something like this keeping that relatively low is good but for something like a bonnet or a hood of a car for example you might want to turn that up high if you know the part itself is actually relatively smooth you can turn the mesh smoothness up high and be comfortable that you're not going to get rid of any data or smooth any data that actually has texture or geometry to it.
20:24 Watertight we don't need to do that in this case, we know there's going to be holes in our mesh model because we haven't got everything, if we were modeling or scanning something like a bracket or something that we know is a solid part and then we wanted to just take that straight to 3D printing to recreate it then we could make a watertight model and it would seal up all the little holes and stuff.
20:49 But yeah we can just click apply from there and then that's going to generate the mesh and this is going to take a little while so while that's doing that we will just have a little look at something else, just bear with me for just a moment because that does look like it's going to take a minute.
21:13 So, we'll just jump into Fusion here and this is actually the 3D scan that I took just before using the HD mode and what I've done, I might just work through this process again just to show you how I've brought this in but essentially, so I'll just start a new model here, I'm going to go to the mesh toolbar and I'm going to insert a mesh and from my computer here and then I've just got that part saved and once this mesh is generated that we're working on at the moment, I'll go through this process again and show you it in the full process from taking the mesh from the scanner to the computer and then going from there.
21:59 But while this is just generating I'll show you this HD one.
22:03 So, I click that and I go open and it should already be somewhat aligned with the coordinate system just from some post processing work that you can do in the scanner.
22:18 So, this HD mesh, I did this ahead of time just because it has quite a lot larger file size, it's got a lot more elements in the mesh so it's just a little bit harder on the processing, I didn't want to do it live naturally because it's quite a slow process and we'd be standing here for 15-20 minutes just waiting on it while this one will probably take less than 5 minutes.
22:42 But yeah, I'm okay with that, I'm just inserting the mesh and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to jump over to our solids toolbar, so just to confirm we've got this single mesh body in our browser here, I'm going to jump over to the solids toolbar and I'm just going to create a form and the reason that I'm going to do this is if we go to this, I'm trying to create a plane based on this mesh.
23:12 If I go to this construct tab here and I try to use the plane through three points tool, you'll see that I can't actually click on the mesh anywhere here but if I go into the create form toolbar and I do the same thing, it just kind of converts that body into something that we can pick up on a little bit more easily.
23:35 So, what I'm going to do is just create a plane based on the mesh that I know is going to be perpendicular to the cylinder boards which is of course going to be in line with the head mounting surface here.
23:49 So, I'm just going to click three kind of well divided points on the surface and that's going to fit this plane to the top there and that should be pretty good and I'll go okay there, finish form.
24:03 Now, what I'm going to do is jump into the mesh toolbar and I'm going to create a mesh section sketch.
24:10 So, we really like using this tool at HPA.
24:14 We use it for quite a lot of projects when we're working with 3D scans because it's a really good way of reverse engineering from the scan data or picking up or using that mesh model to create kind of solid geometry for references or designing new parts for example.
24:31 So, this is just asking me to select the body that we want to create that section sketch through and the section plane which is the one that we just clicked there and then if I just drag that down 10 millimeters, we can see, that's gone down 20, just drag it back up a little bit, doesn't really matter, it'll give us the same result either way but we can see this kind of faint orange profile here is the profile where that plane intersects that mesh body surface.
25:04 So, what I'm going to do is just click okay there and it is just taking a little while to process this one because it's quite a big mesh file so things are slowed down a little bit.
25:17 I can, oh, this one's done so after we do this we'll jump straight back into processing that fast mode version of the scan so I'll just get rid of those construction lines here, go back to the sketch here which contains that profile, I'll hit edit sketch and then what I can do is under the create tab here, this is kind of the next important second stage to using this section sketch tool is fit curves to mesh section and then I can fit a circle here to the cylinder bores so just click each of those and you can't quite see it so I'll just hide the body but you can see that's just fit a circle to the profile from the mesh section and it has a curve deviation here which is a 0.3 value but that will be affected quite a lot by this area around here where we have a bit of a kind of weird part going on in our mesh and a little gap here that I didn't really scan good enough but I'm pretty happy with that so we'll just go okay and then what we're going to do, just because we're just using this to take measurements from to check the accuracy, I'm just going to use the constraint lock tool just to lock down those circles that were fitted there, it's just taking a little while which is a pain, bear with me while this works, alright lock lock, let's just turn green then I'm just going to use the dimension tool here and those are just going to be driven dimensions so we've got 86.6 and 86.3 or 4 as those bores and we also have a bore spacing of 113.0 something there, bear with me while I get my verniers out and I know this is not the correct way to measure the bore of an engine block but this is just what I have on hand, it's an easy to use setup so if I do measure these now, I'll check in a few, I've got 86.26, just being careful on the bores obviously, 86.24, 86.28, so we're about 86.3 pretty much on every measurement there and the bore spacing of a FA20 like this is 113mm, I just looked that up online before, so basically if we look at the kind of error that we've got here, we've got plus.1 of a mil here, plus.3 of a mil on this one and we're pretty much bang on the money here so there's obviously some kind of discrepancy in the way that I'm measuring this accuracy, it's not exactly the best way to do it but it is a very easy quick check that we can do but I would say within.3 or .1 of a mil in most cases here we're very good accuracy for a prosumer level 3D scanner like this, that's really really good and of course that's very usable for most of the projects that we'll be working on, if we've only got.1 mil of an error in our model we can be pretty sure that most of the parts we design are going to fit up to an engine blocker if we're doing scan based design or if we're trying to reverse engineer something we're going to be pretty close as well.
29:08 So, I'll just leave that one as it is and then we'll just jump back onto the screen of the Vega, so we can see here that we've got our mesh and that all looks pretty good, pretty happy with that and we'll go, that's all been applied so we're just going to go complete there and then from this space here there's a few kind of options, I can on the right hand side here do a bit of an alignment, it's pretty basic I would say, so if we just click on that top view I can just kind of rotate this into alignment with the coordinate system and I would really recommend doing an alignment on any 3D scanning stuff you're working on before bringing it into CAD if you can but if you're using a kind of tool like this that is limited sometimes it can be best to just leave it out of alignment and do the alignment in the CAD software so you can get a really good alignment but basically what that means is when you come to model off the 3D scan you can use your coordinate system to your advantage and it makes things a lot more efficient if you're sketching you can constrain lines to horizontal and the coordinate system and vertical and so on to make things a lot easier, it just makes it a lot easier when you come time to actually work with the scan later on to have it in alignment so we'll leave that like that anyway I'll just go complete there so we've kind of aligned that with the coordinate system, there is some other tools here we can do some more with this scissors tool here we can do some more clipping like we did before to remove data we don't need, if we scanned color texture we can do some texture mapping and so on from here and we do have this little measurement icon down the bottom here that we can you know take measurements along our scan with and so on but I find that generally speaking we don't need to do too much of that I'm just going to rename this one here to FA20 fast tick and then what I'm going to do is just go complete in this case and then I have another piece of software open on my computer which is the star vision software from Einstar and I have the Einstar connected I have found I'll just let it finish doing it saving that if it is plugged in and I take a scan then I need to kind of unplug it and plug it back in to refresh it to get the scan from there what I can actually do with these is come into the scan and actually use the share icon at the top and upload it to the workspace and then kind of get it that way so you don't actually have to have it plugged into your computer as long as it's connected to the internet sorry I just realized I did that without showing you this little share icon up the top here share and then upload that to a workspace that you're working in and they give you five gigs of storage there from shining 3D so you basically upload it to the shining 3D cloud and then you can send it from there what I'm going to do is just connect it to my computer which is a pretty reasonable way of doing it as well like I said here just before just going to unplug that just wait for it to notice that it's lost it might take a minute there we go and then I'm just going to plug it back in cool then on the screen here I just click on file transfer rather than charging only then I can jump back to here I have this FA20 fast scan that we just took I'm going to click that import workspace right chuck it in this FA20 block one and then that's just going to import that for me and then we can basically we've taken the scan done everything we need to do on the Einstar Vega itself and we can just bring this one straight into our CAD software check the accuracy compare it to our HD scan and then we should be looking pretty good so a couple more moments won't disconnect it till it's finished that cool and I've got both of these scans in this one now so I've got FA20 HD and FA20 fast and that's just a point cloud it's showing but that there is the mesh so we can see we captured that a lot quicker I'll show you a demo of using the HD mode in just a moment but I'm pretty happy of that I can do some more alignment stuff measuring and cropping from here as well like we did in the software but I'm just going to export that as a simple STL mesh file into this folder save it's easy as that jump back into Fusion here I start a new design and then I am going to go to the mesh toolbar insert mesh select from my computer get that file drop that in this is all going a lot quicker because it's obviously a lot of a smaller mesh file I mean geometry wise it's the same size but it's got a lot less faces to it if we zoom in here and then if we can kind of compare it to this one here we can see this is a lot higher resolution it's a lot more crisp on those edges and so on those holes are a bit more defined we're getting these numbers down the side of the block look quite good whereas if you compare it to this you can already see it it's quite a bit different I don't know if we got a good scan of where those numbers are yeah you can see the what you're kind of missing out on there with that lower resolution obviously you can reduce the resolution of the HD scan mode and you can pump it up for the fast mode to get those closer but this was just a kind of default settings that we're working with anyway we'll jump over to here and we will create a plane through three points again just use that same kind of method here and then we're going to jump back to the mesh toolbar create a mesh section sketch through that body this plane and we'll just drag that down 10 mils like we did before that's going to create our sketch hide that plane edit that sketch I didn't do alignment on this so good so it's a little bit off to an angle oh no it is actually locked into our coordinate system pretty good there that's just a way that the plane has been created it's not too much of a problem I'm just going to look at again and then I'm just going to fit curves to mesh section fitting that circle to the cylinder balls there okay and then lock those and then we're just going to get the measurement tools here so 86.63 and 86.5 and 112.9 so I think you can see from that that the accuracy is still within 0.3 is the worst here this is kind of 0.2 0.25 away and this is a little bit further away varies marginally from the original one so I think in terms of the accuracy of this fast mode it's actually given us quite an accurate result as well and it's a lot faster than that HD mode which again I'll demo in just a second for you a little bit of a drawback in terms of accuracy and as we discussed before it's definitely not quite there in terms of the resolution but it's also not really intended that fast mode for a scan of a really kind of detailed part like this you would use the HD mode for that so you can kind of see the slight differences there and just to highlight that point a little bit further I'm just going to jump back to here exit out of this come back and we are just going to go to the HD mode and I'll just do a quick scan of the engine block or show you kind of what it's like scanning in that mode because it is quite different to the fast mode the experience that you have I find the fast mode is just probably one of the best scanning experiences I've had with any of the scanners I try in terms of picking up data quickly and efficiently and making it really easy the HD mode is not the hardest or not the worst but it is you have to be a lot closer to the object and it is very slow as you'll see in just a moment I'm not very slow actually it's not too bad but you do have to be very close so we can see here if we look at the range on the right hand side of the screen that's kind of optimal at the moment and I don't know if you can really see that on the main camera there but that is within 200mm of the object there to get it in the optimal range that is really really close to it we can click this button here kind of see the range we are working with is 300-100mm but yeah it's pretty close up so if I do scan here, let's get me to hold steady and then same thing there if I stay within that range just a bit far away there I just have to move a lot more carefully we're capturing a lot less data but it is a much higher resolution there so it's obviously you know if we compare that to before with the fast mode we were capturing basically the whole engine block in one shot and we can move around a lot kind of quicker it's doing a pretty good job of tracking there still but it's obviously a very different experience so if you were scanning something really large with this mode it would take a long time and there's a lot more risk of kind of losing tracking and stuff as well so you get the kind of idea of how the experience of scanning with these modes is quite different and if you can get away with scanning with that fast mode I reckon that's probably the way to go if you're worried about the amount of time you're spending and stuff working on certain projects but if you really do want to get a lot of detail and a really good scan then using this HD mode is going to give you the optimum results for a project like this so I won't progress too much further on with that scan there but you get the idea about how those two kind of differ so if I just hit that cross button there on the side I can clear that scan data pretty easily.
41:01 Cool so we've taken a scan on both modes we've progressed through it showed you how it works we've brought those both into our CAD software and had a little look at how to bring that into CAD and then the accuracy compared on those two modes as well let's just kind of finish off with a little bit of a summary of what all this kind of means so I think basically to summarize the main points of the scanner the fast mode is extremely good for large scans like engine bays body panels and so on the HD mode is a little bit more tricky to use but it works pretty good for smaller stuff it's just a lot more time consuming but if you want the optimal results that's what you're going to get at the end of the day we're comparing two modes on the same product so you get both of them anyway it's not like we're looking at two different scanners so in the end you just basically get really good flexibility with a scanner like this which for something at the price point it's at is a pretty good tool to have in your toolbox I would say the original Einstar we looked at before probably sits somewhere between those two scanning modes probably closer to that faster mode but I'd say it kind of gives you a little bit better resolution than the fast mode but it's not as fast and efficient at capturing the data as well and the reality of using that original one is you can't you can scan something like this and get decent results but definitely not to the level of the HD mode and I don't think the accuracy is quite as good as this one from my experience with it anyway I kind of ended up with something like 0.5 of a mil off rather than 0.3 or so so as you'd expect the newer more expensive scanner is a little bit better but the original one is still very good as well essentially the conveniences of the Vega with being able to do it wirelessly and just making it kind of so easy with the dual mode and wireless and it's less affected by troublesome surfaces like black or shiny or translucent surfaces and weird lighting conditions like scanning outside in the sunlight it just makes it a lot easier to use basically and I'm saying that the Einstar was actually really good in itself compared to some of the other scanners we trialed; so, what one should you buy I guess in the end if you're looking at it well a lot of people I've talked to ended up buying the original Einstar, because it was so good but what they found then is that the laptops that they had or the computer they were working with wasn't actually up to running the Einstar.
43:47 Obviously, that kind of goes out the window when you're working with this by the time you bring it onto your computer you still need enough processing power to work with the mesh file and so on, but actually just processing the point cloud to the mesh is probably more demanding.
44:03 So yeah, essentially, they bought that and then they had to then upgrade their laptop, so they probably ended up spending you know more than double that anyway which is about where this sits so you might end up in some cases if you don't have a really powerful laptop already just spending more money than buying this so it really depends where you sit on that what you value what type of projects you're working on I think both are great products in that kind of more consumer or lower pro level category, but yeah, I think it's becoming more and more accessible to be able to do this 3D scanning stuff anyway if we look at products from five years ago and this price range there basically weren't any or any worth trying and the only other scanner that I've used that has it all built in one like this is a Artec Leo which at the time I used it was about $40,000, so completely different range and I'm not saying they're comparable but I'm just saying how this technology is coming down and becoming more and more accessible and great for us working on our project cars and so on to use with all that said I'm really interested in seeing the new Einstar product which is the Riggle or Rigle not sure how you pronounce that but it's essentially a hybrid 3D scanner using structured light and also laser lines as well and that's going to be really good for getting deep into all the bolt holes and stuff like this that sits at a higher price point I think it's about $5,000 as it's just come out but for some of us that's still kind of within reach for home projects anyway and definitely becomes more of a professional use item.
45:55 Before we wrap up I will just say a reminder that the giveaway is running if you want to win one of these head over to that giveaway again Jayden has dropped the link to that in the chat one day left to enter no matter where you are in the world you can enter and we'll send that out to you and get you set up with the ultimate training package as well so you can learn how to use that for your CAD projects for your car and do a whole lot more like tuning and wiring and engine building and so on.
46:26 Cool, so, if there's been any questions in the chat I'll just jump over to that now and do my best to answer those.
46:40 Cool so, Wolf's Blade 127, "How well would this work trying to make or design a rear diffuser? I'm curious how this would work for front clipping a car from the strut towers, can this also predetermine bends in tube and possible?".
47:05 I would say I've pretty much done all of those projects that you're talking about, we did a rear diffuser for the SR86 off a 3D scan using a different 3D scanner but I'd say I'd probably use this one for that, scan the back of the car from the rear axle back, essentially you design a rear diffuser in CAD, be pretty easy to do using a bit of surface modelling or even just solid modelling in Fusion and then you can actually use that to then create a kind of reverse of that, make a pattern for example or make a mould straight from your design file and then make the composite part straight from there.
47:53 So, something like that would work really good, front clipping a car, predetermining bends and so on, definitely we've done subframe design and roll cage design now based off 3D scans, basically it's quite actually easy to use 3D sketches and so on to determine where the weldment or the tubular structure is going to be and then use something like the pipe tool in Fusion to create the pipes, all the individual parts and then we can export step files and send those straight to CNC bender and notcher, we've used Auto Bend here in New Zealand who are in Christchurch and they bent and notched all the tubes for our subframe for our CRX for us and then a little bit of finishing or filleting kind of the edges or adding chamfers and then they were ready to weld and fit up great.
48:50 So, yeah all very possible and 3D scanning is kind of the base of that to make it all a lot easier than going out to the car and measuring everything a hundred times.
49:00 It's basically able to take millions of measurements all very quickly, it's like the world's fastest tape measure.
49:08 Alright, Mountain Dog Rally, "Can I use free 3D scan apps on my phone and how's your day?".
49:15 My day's been pretty good, thanks for asking.
49:19 Free 3D scan apps on the phone, yeah I've tried a few of them, they work on photogrammetry typically and depending on what phone you have, if it's capable of LiDAR scanning then it's a lot better.
49:32 I can't think of any of the scanning apps that I'd recommend off the top of my head, because I've tried about 10 of them and a couple of them worked pretty good.
49:45 I think we might have some content on that somewhere, a bit of a list, so maybe search for that through the HPA side or YouTube channel or whatever, that might help.
49:59 These scanning apps using photogrammetry typically have much lower resolution than what we've just looked at, but in saying that I have done a scan of the strut towers across an engine bay and designed a strut tower brace that way and it's worked perfectly fine.
50:16 When you are working off something where the resolution isn't that great and the accuracy isn't that great, sometimes you just need to design whatever you're working on with a little bit more tolerance, so slotting holes and things like that and just understanding that maybe when you come to assemble it on the car there might be issues, so you leave certain parts of the design to be jigged on the car for example.
50:40 Just different considerations but that is definitely an approach that will work, you can use your phone to do 3D scans.
50:47 Kevlar, "If I wanted to scan a truck grill how could I section the scan into smaller pieces to enable me to 3D print it?".
50:58 Okay, so typically when, if you're going to work with a 3D scan and you're never going to convert that to a 3D body in your CAD software then you need to make it watertight, so basically close it all in so it's a solid part to be able to 3D print it.
51:21 Obviously, the mesh file that we get from the 3D scanner like an STL is something that we can 3D print so we can bring that straight into our slicing software and 3D print it and so on, not an issue there.
51:33 There are some, so can I just jump back into here for example, we could jump back into here, use the clipping thing, look at this from the side and we might just, oh, clicked the wrong button, sorry, bear with me, look at this from straight on, there we go, and we could just, if it's going to let me, select through, ah, right, bear with me, just figuring this out on the go.
52:12 We could basically select that, I don't know why it's not letting me do that, not selecting anything, probably just a button, ah, there we go, so we could select it, just to kind of section it, we could duplicate this a few times, select one, delete that for example, that's done a really bad job of it, but delete the whole thing and then we could like patch up this face and then have those sections and then 3D print it and so on, or the alternative is to bring it into your CAD software like this, I'll just see if I have a model here which might work, bear with me, 3D printing, right, this is just a little solid model of a 3D printed suspension bushing, so if it was too big here I could just come in here, I could move copy on that, just duplicate it so I have two of them, and then I could go to the first one, create a plane, bring that down, come through, split body, and just split that by that plane, okay, so now I have the bottom and the top, and then from there it would just be a matter of going for example to our mesh toolbar, going export, 3D print and we could export each of one of those and then bring it into our slicing software or we can actually in this one go straight to our slicing software from there, go okay, that's going to open up Bamboo Studio, drop that straight on to the build platform for me and then if I go back to Fusion here, do basically the same thing, 3D print that bottom body and let's drop that over onto the Bamboo Studio thing as well and get the idea, just move that out of the way, print those two sections and that's basically the way you do it, but obviously to get to this point you need to in your CAD software create a solid body from it, from your scan, and depending on how the kind of truck grill you're talking about is what the geometry is like, that might be really difficult or really easy, in our 3D scanning course we have a reverse engineering section that's dedicated to recreating a 3D scan as a solid body, so referencing that mesh, creating a solid body and then you could go from there and 3D print it in any way you want.
55:15 The actual worked example we used is that tubular manifold just over my shoulder there, so I scanned that, recreated it in CAD as a solid body and then I could 3D print it out of metal if I wanted to, basically the same thing that you're talking about I think.
55:30 I'll just jump back over to those questions, see if we've got anything else, nope we don't, that looks like it's it.
55:37 So, hopefully that's given you a little bit of insight into how easy it can be to capture 3D scans and use them in our automotive projects, but basically how the Einstar Vega works and how products like this are quickly making 3D scanning more and more accessible.
55:56 Like I said, there's some more content coming on this scanner and how to use it for your projects coming soon so keep your eyes out for that and also if you're interested in this 3D scanning stuff for automotive projects, I'd recommend checking out our 3D scanning course where you can pick up all these skills.
56:14 But I'll leave it there so thanks for watching and we'll see you next week.