Summary

In this webinar, we'll show how the new Einstar 2 and Einstar Rockit scanners use laser technology to improve scan quality and accuracy. 

00:00 Hey team, Connor here from HPA.
00:02 Welcome to another one of our webinars.
00:03 Today we're going to be looking at some 3D scanning using some laser 3D scanning today with the relatively new Einstar 2 and the Einstar Rocket as well from Shining3D.
00:16 They're really affordable, accessible scanners that do a great job for what we need them for.
00:22 So, we're going to start off by having a discussion about how laser scanning works and how that's different for maybe a more conventional structured light scanning that we'd usually, see at this price range.
00:34 We're going to have a look at what the workflow actually looks like with both of these scanners.
00:39 They're essentially the same anyway in that regard.
00:42 And then we're going to talk about how the results compare and what benefit laser scanning is to us.
00:49 So, just to start things off, if you're not very familiar with laser 3D scanning, we're just going to cover kind of how the technology roughly works.
00:58 So basically, as you might be able to see under the overhead...
01:04 Bear with me a sec... if we look at the front of the rocket here, we can see a series of kind of cameras and projectors.
01:13 So, there's a few different things going on here.
01:15 In the middle we can see the sources for the laser projector lines, but we'll just come back to that in a moment.
01:23 What we also have is in the center a projector for the light pattern.
01:30 So, they generally refer to this as something like infrared scanning or structured light scanning.
01:36 So basically, what it's doing is projecting a light pattern with an infrared light source in this case onto whatever the component or part is that we're scanning.
01:51 And then by way of triangulation, it's using these two receiving cameras here to look at how that is projected onto the surface and understand how the shape of the projected pattern changes and use that to build a 3D model of the part that we're scanning.
02:15 The alternative to that... well, basically, I'll just talk through the kind of benefits and downsides, I guess, of that approach.
02:22 Generally, the major benefit of it is efficiency.
02:25 So, it's a really fast and quick way to capture lots of data.
02:34 So, that's generally why it's used.
02:36 And then the downside of it is when you're dealing with what we could kind of refer to as troublesome surfaces.
02:44 So, if we think about it projecting a light source onto a surface, it's really important for the scanner how the light interacts with that surface.
02:54 So, if we have reflective surfaces that reflect a lot of light or translucent surfaces that the light passes through, or even black surfaces that absorb a lot of the light, the scanner can kind of struggle to pick up what's happening on that surface and create the model.
03:11 So, that's one kind of major downside to structured light scanning, is dealing with surfaces like that.
03:18 There are ways to deal with it, like using scanning sprays and, so on.
03:22 And then the other side is resolution.
03:25 We can generally get really good resolution and accuracy with these type of scanners, but it does tend to fall short a little bit if you are imagining scanning into a hole on the part we're working on.
03:38 As we project that light source in, then the other receiving cameras can only see, so much down that hole.
03:45 So, it becomes quite hard to scan into kind of tight details, bolt holes, and other kind of crevices.
03:52 So, we tend to miss data down there, which may or may not be a problem.
03:57 There are again other ways around it, like we can, if we have a threaded bolt hole, we can thread a stud into it and pick up on that a lot easier if we're just trying to find the whole location and, so on.
04:08 But they are the downsides.
04:09 When we talk about laser scanning, it works kind of via a very similar method where it's projecting a light source onto it and then using the triangulation receiving it to understand how that light source interacts with the surface to build the 3D model.
04:28 But instead of projecting a light pattern with an infrared light source that generally the human eye is not really going to be able to see, it's projecting these blue laser lines that are very straight lines, generally parallel lines, maybe a single line or kind of a crosshatch pattern of them.
04:50 And because those lasers are a higher intensity, they tend to be able to deal with those troublesome surfaces a lot better.
05:02 It also, the kind of other main benefit of them when it comes to resolution is you can get deeper into the tight details and get generally a higher resolution, more crisp scan.
05:15 The downside again is they're much slower at capturing the data and it's kind of harder processing on our computer as well.
05:26 So, it's just not as efficient as the structured light method.
05:30 But as we move on today, you should be able to kind of see how the results compare and the actual scanning experience as well.
05:39 And maybe that'll guide you into what type of scanner you're looking for.
05:44 The benefit of these scanners though is you can just do both methods with them.
05:48 So, you can kind of get the best of both worlds again at a relatively affordable price.
05:54 I think the Einstar 2 is just under a thousand US dollars and the Rocket is over, but I think it's fifteen hundred dollars or less.
06:03 So, in terms of 3D scan is relatively affordable and really useful tools.
06:08 So, with that out of the way, what we're going to do is jump onto my laptop here.
06:15 And I have the Shining 3D scanner operating software open.
06:22 So, it's called EX-Star Hub for these two scanners.
06:27 A little bit different to the EX-Star that we use for the original Einstar scanner for those who are kind of familiar with that.
06:37 But it all works very similar anyway.
06:40 So, all I've done here is I've just got the scanner connected and I've done a calibration recently.
06:46 That's just something that you kind of have to do every couple of weeks or, so with scanners to make sure they're capturing data accurately.
06:54 The other thing that I just wanted to talk about quickly, you'll see that I have the scanner tethered to the laptop using the USB-C connection.
07:05 But with that said, you can actually connect both of these scanners to your laptop just using Wi -Fi.
07:13 So, obviously drains the battery a little bit more and tends to be a little bit slow when it comes to the processing and everything, but it is quite handy to be able to do that.
07:23 You still need to be able to use your laptop for the operating software rather than something like the Einstein Vega or the RevoPoint Miraco, I think it's called, which are an all-in-one unit with a screen on the back, but a little step up in the price.
07:40 Cool.
07:40 So, we'll just jump back a little bit, clear that.
07:45 When we go to start a new project, we have these two options here, which is laser scan, like what I discussed, and the infrared scan, they're calling it in this case, and that is structured light, in other words.
08:00 Suitable for human body because it's using infrared light, you don't want to be scanning someone with lasers in their eyes, but general object scanning as well.
08:10 And you can see laser scan here saying suitable for scanning black reflective items, workpieces for high precision and high detail, the trade -off being essentially time in that scanning process.
08:22 We will just start doing a kind of general scan here with the structured light setting.
08:29 Going to go object, medium to large object.
08:34 We'll start off by just tracking features rather than the markers, and I'll show you how that goes.
08:40 And then the resolution, we'll keep it at 0.5.
08:44 And you can see that is the... we'll go to 0.2 there.
08:48 We'll go to 0.2.
08:50 Yeah, we'll just leave it at 0.5.
08:53 God, if it'll let me.
09:00 I don't know what's going on here.
09:02 God, that's going to take a while.
09:05 Five, there we go.
09:06 All right.
09:08 And we don't need to be capturing texture.
09:10 So, when we talk about this alignment here, again, if you're not familiar with 3D scanning, that's basically the scanner understanding its position in space relative to the part and also tracking how it moves around it.
09:23 And it can do that based on the features, so geometric features of the part, actually picking up the forms of it as it moves.
09:32 That's generally a little bit harder for it than markers.
09:36 Markers are the little targets that we see stuck onto things that we're 3D scanning.
09:42 Completely possible to do it without the markers.
09:44 We'll show that first.
09:46 But it does kind of give you a few issues on something like this.
09:50 And you can also track by texture, which is like the colors of something.
09:55 Generally, if we have a part that, like a bonnet or something, or a door of a car that doesn't have many geometric features or maybe texture on it, then you need to use markers because as we're moving along, the scanner thinks it sees the same thing over and over and gets confused.
10:14 If that car had a livery or a paint job or something with graphics in it, it can track with those graphics using the texture one.
10:24 And again, if there are actually geometric features to scan, it can track using that.
10:31 We'll show you kind of how that looks as we progress.
10:36 The issue we're going to run into here is when we're tracking off features and we have repetitive features, so that might be if we're scanning like a differential gear or a torque converter or something, or even a wheel, where it can look the same from multiple angles, then the scanner can also get confused with that because again, it thinks it sees the same frame over and over.
11:01 And when we're scanning on turntables like this that have a nice perfectly round edge, it could be looking at that for its reference and then kind of get confused, even if you have something like this on it.
11:14 And I think that might be what we're about to see here.
11:18 We're going to leave all these settings kind of as they are, take off that plane detection, and then I have a little button on the back here that I can just start the preview with, and we can see that's picking up the part there.
11:34 And I'm just going to hit play again, and now we're actually scanning.
11:39 So, you can see on the left-hand side of my screen there, there's little light indicators that if I move too far away, it starts getting angry at me, basically, because it's too far away to pick up data.
11:52 And then if I move too close, same thing, it's getting kind of confused because it's too close.
11:59 We want to stay in that optimum range.
12:01 Don't worry about it picking up my hand as I spin the turntable around.
12:08 We can remove all that in the kind of post -processing anyway, but we can see it's actually doing a pretty good job of tracking it in this case, because it's looking at the caliper in the middle there.
12:23 And you can see how quickly I've basically taken that scan.
12:28 Okay, there we can see the error start to creep in, where it's shifted on that kind of vertical axis because it sees the... yeah, and now it's really gone bad, because it's just picking up the kind of consistent shape of the turntable that we're working on.
12:48 So, that's one of the issues that we kind of run into.
12:52 So, if we're just working off scanning off the geometric features.
12:58 So, I'm just going to clear that, jump back to my project, delete that project, and just start again.
13:06 We're still doing an infrared scan.
13:08 I'm going to do a new project, but this time I'm just going to track off the markers instead of the features.
13:14 You can do hybrid and do both, but we'll just keep it simple in this case.
13:21 And this actually also kind of helps us with a few other things as well, which I'll get to in just a moment.
13:27 So, hit play to start the preview, and we can see there all the red dots, it's picking up those markers.
13:38 And again, I'm spinning this relatively quick because I know the kind of infrared or structured light scanning can keep up pretty well.
13:55 Cool.
13:59 All right, I'm pretty happy with that.
14:03 There we go.
14:06 So, I've just scanned it from the top.
14:08 Now, what I want to do is remove everything that I don't need.
14:13 Looks like the resolution was actually set to 0 .22 on that.
14:16 All right, that's fine.
14:18 So, I'm going to remove everything that I don't need.
14:20 A few ways of doing this.
14:23 The kind of quick and easy way, I've just got the paintbrush selection tool here, is just holding shift on the keyboard, selecting something on the caliper, and then I'm going to expand that to the connected domain.
14:35 It thinks that everything's connected, so I've got to unselect that.
14:38 Yeah, I can see this point here.
14:41 I'm just going to give it a quick trim through there, delete that.
14:45 Now, I think it hopefully isn't connected.
14:49 Yeah, that looks good.
14:51 Invert that, then I can just delete everything that I don't need off there.
14:55 Okay, now this is one of the kind of key steps above the original Einstar that I've found really useful in this new software.
15:03 And if we go down here, we can see at the moment we're editing the point cloud, but we can also click that and edit the markers as well.
15:11 I'm just going to explain really quickly why that's kind of helpful.
15:14 If we're scanning something like this, and we're scanning it on a turntable rather than kind of hanging in space and working around it, it's quite hard to scan the underside of it naturally.
15:24 So, what I find is sometimes if I'm scanning and I'm using the targets on the table, when I go to flip it over, it generally thinks those targets are all in the same place and it kind of combines or flips the model upside down and combines them and it makes it all messy.
15:43 Also, if I wanted to do it where I can actually do two projects, which I'll show you how to do, and then align it based on the targets, I don't want to have these targets here.
15:53 And then when I flip it up, they think it's upside down and it tries to align them based on these targets.
15:58 Again, it's just not really going to work.
16:00 So, what we can do is keep the targets on the actual part or the scanning targets, edit the markers, and then I'm just going to paint all of those and delete them, apply that edit.
16:17 So, that means now what I can do is flip this upside down and I'm just balancing it on these little 3D printed, if we look under the overhead, there's a little 3D printed pyramid.
16:35 It just makes removing that data from underneath it a lot easier because it's kind of lifting it off.
16:41 Generally, also when we're scanning brake calipers, we want the pads in them, so we can kind of use it for alignment later on and push nice and straight up against the pistons.
16:55 So, one way to do this is because it's going to pick up those targets on the front.
17:01 I can just start that preview again and it's already found where it's at.
17:09 And then I can start scanning again and same thing, just quickly work around.
17:21 I'm kind of capturing it from as much angles as possible to fill in all the data that we don't have.
17:33 Cool, looking pretty good.
17:37 I could obviously spend a lot more time doing this, but just keep things interesting for you guys.
17:44 I won't.
17:46 And I'm gonna have to kind of trim this out here, delete that, then hopefully we can do that.
18:01 Expand, oh no, it still thinks it's connected.
18:05 Let's see where that might be.
18:08 Looks pretty well separated.
18:23 There we go.
18:25 Invert, delete, and just while we're at it, we'll just delete all those other markers out of there.
18:36 Delete selected data, apply, edit.
18:38 Cool, so now we have our scan using the structured light.
18:45 I'm just going to generate the point clouds for that, which will take just a moment, and then we'll move on to just processing that, save it, and then we'll do a scan with the laser scanner and then kind of compare the two afterwards as well.
19:01 Just while this is processing, for those of you who are interested, if we look under the overhead, this is a well-used Porsche Brembo caliper from a Cayman base spec.
19:14 It's a pretty common Brembo, you know, monoblock caliper, which is a really nice little upgrade on cars with relatively small wheels, like 15 inches or so, it fits under really well.
19:26 Common swap for Hondas using the honed kind of kit that they've developed.
19:32 People use them on MX-5s as well.
19:35 The reason I actually have one is not for my Honda daily driver, it's for my 240Z, so I'm trying to kind of do some work with scans of these to see if they're going to fit under my wheels and work pretty well, because the piston sizes in this is pretty much exactly the same as the 240Z standard one, but you get the benefit of having staggered pistons, four of them, rather than a single sliding one, which is all kind of flexible and not good for braking.
20:04 This is also bigger and lighter than the other one.
20:09 Radial mount, which I quite like, and a little bit easier to get pads for and, so on as well.
20:16 And of course it allows for a vented disc, and the 240Z standard ones are just a solid, I think like 12mm thick disc, and this allows for a vented 24mm disc.
20:28 So, it's a good little step up while keeping the braking package nice and light, but giving you a lot more kind of stiffness in the braking package as well.
20:40 So, hopefully I can make it all work.
20:44 Okay, so there we have our point cloud.
20:48 If we zoom in, we can kind of see that's just all the data points that were captured in space, and then what I'm going to do now from here is just mesh the model and keep it all on the standard settings here.
21:04 Maximum triangles, I like to run with two million, as I find the computers I kind of work on generally work pretty good with that.
21:15 We'll fill, marker hole filling, so as we scan this and we have markers on the surface, it's naturally, not scanning what's underneath.
21:23 That's made these nice holes in our model, so it's just automatically going to fill those for us.
21:28 We don't need it to be watertight, the mesh, because we're not trying to 3D print this or anything.
21:34 So, hopefully this processes it a little bit quicker now and the program doesn't crash.
21:42 Bam.
21:43 Okay, cool.
21:44 Confirm.
21:46 So, there we have our mesh model, which for those of you who aren't familiar with meshes, if we zoom right in, you can kind of see what it is.
21:55 It's the surface of our model split up into these little triangular elements, and the smaller those elements, the finer the resolution we can get, but also the issue being that it's a bigger file size that's harder to kind of work with as well.
22:14 But generally, it looks like a pretty good scan.
22:16 A little bit of surface noise on there.
22:19 And we can kind of see, you know, I scanned on quite a high resolution, which is why it took a while to process there, but the details are relatively crisp anyway.
22:30 One key point, I'll just look at this Brembo logo on it, because that'll be a good detailed feature for kind of comparing it to the laser scan.
22:40 So, just keep in mind what that looks like.
22:42 And just quickly, what I'm going to do is export this to the desktop.
22:50 Oh god, please don't.
22:55 Please don't crash.
22:57 And then we'll get started really quickly with the laser scan.
23:01 All right, desktop, scan, IR, Brembo, save.
23:07 I think I saved that as an STL.
23:10 Let me just check.
23:12 Yep, I did.
23:12 Cool.
23:13 All right.
23:14 Awesome.
23:15 Let's jump back then to here.
23:18 We'll clear all of that and we'll do a laser scan.
23:26 Okay, now we just want to set up this project.
23:30 I'm just going to do the same thing, scan on markers rather than doing feature alignment here, because I have done a little bit of trials with this before and we basically get the same result as with the infrared setting.
23:46 If I was to take it off the turntable and just scan it on the bench and walk around it, it would actually scan a lot better, especially on the infrared mode, and we wouldn't kind of get that issue creeping in.
23:57 But markers, as annoying as they are to kind of set them all up and take them on and off and so on, they can be, you know, an added cost.
24:08 They do speed up the whole process.
24:10 What I'm going to do here really quick is just change the resolution to 0.2.
24:14 Why is it still doing that? 0.2.
24:19 No, I definitely hit 2 on my keyboard.
24:23 Try it one more time.
24:25 I don't know.
24:30 Okay, just to keep the resolution the same.
24:33 So, we're capturing the same resolution, but you'll see the results kind of differ a little bit.
24:38 Now, this is where we kind of come into a different side of things, the light source mode here.
24:44 We can have 7 parallel lines or we can actually have 38 cross lines.
24:50 So, 19 one way and 19 another way.
24:52 And that makes it all a little bit faster, but also we're capturing more data at once, so it's harder for the computer to kind of keep up with.
25:03 It's not a reflective surface, so we don't need to worry about that.
25:06 I think that just changes the intensity of the laser lines.
25:09 So yeah, we can crack straight in and get started.
25:13 And you should be able to see the difference.
25:16 I'm not sure if you'll see it through the main camera there, but we now have... if we just jump under the overhead for a moment, you can see on the bench there the cross hatching of those laser lines.
25:32 So blue, kind of purple laser lines there and how that works.
25:36 And if I swap to the 7 line mode, now we have just 7 parallel lines.
25:42 The advantage of that, while not capturing data, so quickly, is you can actually kind of get deeper into the tighter details with that.
25:52 But yeah, we're just going to work like that and tracking off our markers.
25:59 And now it's basically getting started again.
26:03 So, if you can remember what the scanning process looked like with infrared, you should be able to from this, that although I am turning the turntable slower, how the scanner is actually picking up data and getting the blue data there, which is kind of a complete data I guess, or where we've captured the entire surface and it's confident we've got everything we need, it takes a lot longer.
26:30 So, that's just the kind of efficiency side of things when we compare it to the structured light scanning.
26:40 The computer's definitely working a lot harder and it is actually getting, I think, deeper into the kind of details, but it's a lot harder on everything to do it.
26:58 The tracking is much slower.
27:01 I do quite a lot of this, so I'm kind of familiar with how the scanner moves and, so on.
27:10 So, if it's not kind of obvious, just have to take my word for it.
27:13 You should be able to tell by it losing its tracking like that, that it is working a bit harder.
27:19 So, pretty confident.
27:23 Everything looks blue there.
27:26 I'll pause that.
27:29 And straight off the bat, you should be able to see the resolution.
27:32 Everything looks a little bit crisper.
27:35 And we're just going to do the same thing here.
27:37 Just use the paintbrush, span to connected domain, invert that, delete what I don't need.
27:44 Same thing, edit the markers, select those, delete those.
27:54 And now I'm just going to scan the other side.
27:56 So, I could just do it the way we did it before, where I just flipped it over.
28:03 And because I have those markers on, it'll pick up the scanning pretty quickly and kind of carry on from there.
28:09 But what I'm going to do is just generate the point clouds here and show you a slightly different way of doing it.
28:15 So, while that's doing that, I will just flip it over.
28:18 This method can kind of work quite well, depending on what type of project you're working on.
28:27 And it was definitely the way you had to do things in the original Einstar before you could delete the markers out of it.
28:36 So, what we do here is we actually go to the project list and we create a new project.
28:42 And then under this new project, we will basically just scan the underside, just as we did before.
28:51 So, this is a little bit repetitive for you guys.
28:55 I'll try to go quickly, but can only do, so much, obviously.
29:16 And then what we're going to do with these two projects after all of this is use the project alignment, which is basically a way to align multiple scans together.
29:28 And it's a really good way if you kind of can't use markers to just keep the tracking.
29:35 It's just quite a nice way to be able to scan multiple sides of something, like the top side and maybe the bottom side of a bonnet or something like that.
29:48 Oh, struggling a bit.
29:50 Where are we? Yeah, we're good.
29:52 I'll just try to come around here and kind of get some more of this.
30:01 So, I think one of the tricks here, if I just do a short kind of hold and push here, I can swap to those parallel laser lines on this, and then that should hopefully... it's a lot slower for capturing the data, but just allows me to get a little bit deeper into scanning the faces of those pads and, so on, and hopefully into the mounting holes there.
30:29 But again, I can spend, so much time doing this, but just to keep things moving along, we won't.
30:36 Same thing, paintbrush, select that, connected domain, invert, delete, and get those markers.
30:48 Delete.
30:50 Cool.
30:51 And finish that.
30:53 And before we align those two projects together, I do just have to generate the point cloud.
30:59 Looks like it's going to do this one pretty quick for me.
31:03 And after we do all this, we will just have a quick look at comparing the two scans by just looking at them and seeing what the resolution looks like.
31:13 And we'll also just bring it into Fusion, and I'll show you a quick way to and we'll compare the accuracy of the two as well.
31:20 So, there we have the other project, that scan's looking pretty good.
31:26 And if I go down here to projects alignment, I'm going to, in my fix window, select project one, floated window, select project two.
31:37 We'll then see if it wants to do it automatically by markers.
31:44 I really hope this doesn't.
31:46 No, so it's not going to.
31:48 I was saying, I hope it doesn't crash the program, but we'll see.
31:53 So, what I like to do when I'm doing this manually is you basically orientate the two models kind of in the same way.
32:01 And then what we're going to do is just select the markers in the same order.
32:05 So one, two, three, four.
32:08 We'll do the same over here.
32:09 One, two, three, four.
32:13 And then we'll spin them around.
32:17 Got some of the same markers on the back here as well.
32:21 Five, six, seven.
32:25 Five, six, seven.
32:27 Okay, and apply that.
32:29 And then now we can see in this window down here, it's brought those two together in alignment really nicely.
32:36 Hit next, apply.
32:38 So, now we've got those two point clouds aligned to each other and we can mesh the model.
32:47 So same, basically the same settings here and hit preview.
32:54 So, that's converting our point cloud to the mesh and then we'll be able to save that mesh.
32:59 And then we'll just open them in Fusion and have a bit of a better look at them, how we'd actually, use them for doing some of our work.
33:08 Hopefully, this doesn't take too much longer.
33:12 Bear with me.
33:23 Yeah, if you guys have any questions about this as well, or any 3D scanning stuff really, I'll ask them in the chat and I'll do my best to answer them at the end.
33:34 All right, that's looking pretty good.
33:38 So, we can already see just by kind of looking at this, scanned on the same resolution, but you should be able to see the details are just that little bit crisper, especially if we look at the Brembo logo there, if you remember from the other one, but we'll bring them both into a model in just a moment, look at them together.
33:57 A kind of, that isn't necessarily the entire workflow for 3D scanning, something we'd often do by here, if we want to do some mesh editing, fill any holes and do anything from there, we can do all that here.
34:10 If I jump over to this next tab here, we can also do an alignment from here, which I'd usually, recommend doing.
34:18 This software doesn't give you kind of the best alignment tools compared to maybe something like Peel CAD, or Shining 3D also has this EX model software, which is like a scan to CAD reverse engineering software.
34:31 They're a lot better for alignment, but basically what that means is aligning the mesh to the coordinate system.
34:36 So, it's nice and squared up with everything we're working on.
34:39 And then when we bring it into our CAD software, it's already aligned and it just makes our whole process a lot easier.
34:45 So, we'd usually do that from here.
34:47 We're not going to in this case, I'm just going to export the scan to my desktop and we're going to call that scan, what did we call the other one? We'll call this one laser Brambo STL.
34:59 It's just a file format and finish that up there.
35:04 Cool.
35:04 That looks pretty good.
35:06 Oh, and we're just going to jump into Fusion here and I'm going to bring both those meshes in.
35:12 So, I go to the mesh toolbar, insert mesh from my computer and I just saved them.
35:21 Bear with me for a sec.
35:23 Where did I put them? On my desktop.
35:28 Yeah, sorry.
35:31 And I'll dump in the infrared one first.
35:38 Cool.
35:39 If I just look at my origin, I'll just do a real quick job of kind of aligning it, so we can look at them together and go okay.
35:48 And then I'm going to dump the other one in right next to it.
35:54 The laser one.
36:02 Turn that around a bit.
36:08 Roughly the same orientation, kind of.
36:13 All right.
36:14 Close enough that we can look at the two.
36:17 What might make it easier to see is if I just turn off the face groups there.
36:26 Okay.
36:27 So, because we scanned the one on the infrared setting or the structured light, we actually got really good resolution because we scanned it on 0.2.
36:37 So, the edges, I would say, are nice and crisp.
36:40 You can see, though, it's just not quite as nice a scan.
36:43 It's got a little bit more surface noise and, so on.
36:46 And if we zoom in on that Brembo logo, like before, we can see it's actually pretty good.
36:54 But if we look at the Brembo logo on the laser scan, it's just that little bit better.
36:59 You might be thinking, surely this doesn't matter at all for the type of stuff that I'm working on.
37:06 And you might be completely right.
37:08 In some cases, it absolutely doesn't.
37:10 If we look at the bolt hole there, you can see I've kind of got pretty good into it.
37:15 The edge is nice and crisp, but we are missing a little bit of it on the laser scan.
37:22 And you can see it just didn't get quite as deep on the infrared structured light scan.
37:28 And the edge is a little bit more kind of rounded over as well.
37:32 And that's generally what I'd expect the kind of comparison to be between the two.
37:38 What I'm going to do to just kind of check the accuracy of these two, and they're not really the best parts to do it on, but just create a quick section sketch.
37:49 We'll start on this one, which was the laser scan.
37:54 Actually, first, what I need to do is create a plane.
37:57 So, I'm going to go to the forms toolbar.
38:00 I'm going to use the plane through three points tool.
38:03 I'm going to create a plane through three points on the kind of mounting surface down the bottom here.
38:10 And I'll just do the exact same thing for the other caliper that we've got here, which is exactly the same caliper.
38:19 Okay, and then finish that.
38:23 Mesh toolbar, create a mesh section sketch.
38:27 We'll actually start with the one for the laser scan.
38:34 No, the infrared scan, structured light scan.
38:38 And we can click the section plane here and drop that down a little bit.
38:45 And if I hide the body, you should be able to see.
38:52 Basically, what this does is it gives us a section profile as the plane where that plane intercepts the mesh body.
39:01 So, okay, for that, that's what that little kind of burnt orange line is.
39:08 And we'll do the exact same thing on this other one here.
39:26 Cool, that's looking pretty good on both sides.
39:31 Okay, hide the construction planes.
39:34 Now, what I can do is jump in, edit sketch, and then I can fit some curves to those mesh sections, use the circle tool, hide the body.
39:48 This one here first, and fit a circle to that, and a circle to that, go okay.
39:56 And then I can just measure between those two.
39:59 And that's saying 130.375, that's on the infrared sketch.
40:11 And then we'll quickly do the one for the laser sketch as well, fit curves to mesh section, fit some circles, and see what that measures at.
40:28 129.94.
40:30 So, I don't have my verniers on me to prove it, but if we compare those two measurements, we can basically see, I'll tell you what it's actually supposed to be.
40:43 So, it is supposed to be 130 mils, that's what the real parts measure at.
40:48 We can see that we've got 0.06 millimeters of an error on the laser scan, and we had point, let me jump back into it to remember, 0.3 millimeters, I think, on the infrared scan.
41:04 So, you can kind of see there, yeah, 0.37.
41:07 So, it's a little bit further off.
41:09 I'd still say that's relatively good.
41:11 It's less than, it's maybe less than half a percent or something like that.
41:18 Not sure doing the quick maths off the my head there, but you can see we scanned these two things.
41:23 They took roughly the same amount of time.
41:25 Maybe the infrared scan was a little bit quicker.
41:29 The accuracy is not quite as good.
41:31 The resolution, even though we used the same resolution setting, it took quite a long time to process it.
41:36 The resolution's not quite as crisp.
41:39 So, the laser scan has slightly better, well, significantly better accuracy, and it also is a nicer looking scan in the end of the day.
41:48 Probably getting a little bit deeper into the kind of nooks and crannies going on there.
41:52 So, it's a little bit more usable if we're creating mesh section sketches and trying to recreate the geometry.
41:59 It just is a little bit more usable.
42:02 So basically, in the end of all this, that is the benefit of using laser scanning over the structured light.
42:10 But with that said, you can see it's a much slower process when you're actually scanning.
42:14 And if you're scanning a whole engine bay or the underside of a chassis or something like that, structured light is, so much more efficient.
42:21 It would probably just do a better job.
42:25 It'd be a lot more enjoyable to do the job anyway.
42:29 So, we've covered that.
42:31 The last thing I just want to talk about is comparing the Rocket and the Einstar 2 because they're both quite similar scanners from Shining3D.
42:42 Basically, at the end of the day, the Rocket is a little bit more expensive or significantly more expensive.
42:48 Like I said, I'm not sure off the top of my head, but I think it's more around $1, 500 and the Einstar 2 is under $1, 000, I think.
42:56 But the Rocket is faster and more powerful.
43:00 It has the 38 cross lines, so that's 19 by 19 parallel lines in each direction, or it has seven parallel line mode as well.
43:11 And the other thing it can do is when you are in the laser scanning mode, you can scan markerless.
43:17 So, you can track with that option of not using the markers and just picking up on the features if you don't have any markers, or if it's working quite well, for example.
43:27 The Einstar 2, cheaper, more accessible.
43:30 It does have laser scanning, but it only has, I think it's got one option of 17 parallel laser lines.
43:38 Basically, what that means is it's just that little bit slower again.
43:42 It's also that it's not quite as quick at processing, so it's just a slower scanner when you're working in that laser mode compared to the Rocket.
43:52 The other thing that I mentioned just before is if you are doing laser scanning, you have to use markers when you're using the Einstar 2.
44:01 It can't track on the features, can't do markerless tracking with the laser.
44:07 So yeah, basically, we'll wrap up there and I'll jump into the questions.
44:15 Forge and Wanda, why this and not the Metro X Pro? Is it just the IR mode that makes this a better all-in-one? Sorry, off the top of my head, I've looked at the Metro X Pro before and I just can't remember exactly the specs of it.
44:31 Is it just the IR mode that makes this a better all-in-one? So, if we think about, if that means the Metro X Pro doesn't have the infrared structured light only mode, then I would probably say yeah, it makes it a better all-in-one because you can do that structured light scanning.
44:48 It's going to be, so much better and faster for scanning like larger areas and things like that when you don't need that fine resolution.
44:55 I'd always just go for a structured light scanning.
44:58 But sorry, yeah, these are just the scanners we have.
45:01 If someone sends us a Metro X Pro, I'd be happy to look at that as well.
45:06 Same question, two of the same questions here.
45:09 So, Rookie Cookie, what are the specs of the laptop you're using? Just wondering if my Wi-Fi or weakish laptop is causing the very laggy scanning I'm facing, what are the laptop specs? I'm not sure.
45:25 I know I can find it somehow though.
45:36 All right, I have it on my screen here.
45:39 This isn't actually the laptop that I use all the time, but for those of you who are watching this, hopefully you should be able to see from this page everything and be able to compare it to yours without me running through everything.
46:02 I actually tend to work on a MacBook, just a MacBook Pro, which is kind of four years old by this point, and I think only has 16 gig of RAM, although it might have 32.
46:16 And that generally tends to be about the same as this, because I think it is.
46:22 This might actually have a little bit more RAM than mine.
46:24 But anyway, hopefully that kind of helps.
46:27 All right, we'll move on from there.
46:32 I would say though, just backing up on that, if you are using Wi-Fi scanning rather than being plugged in, generally that's going to slow everything down.
46:41 I'd probably just tend to plug in when I could.
46:48 Einstar or Shining 3D do list the laptop specs that they recommend, and generally I remember from the original Einstar that they were relatively high compared to the other scanners.
47:01 It might be the issue you're running into.
47:03 Sorry, I can't answer that question.
47:05 All right, A.
47:06 Daniel H.
47:07 Is the price worth it for the high-end version? I mean, that really comes down to you and what your budget is on it.
47:19 I think if I had the choice out of these two scanners, and I had the budget for it, I'd be choosing the Rocket.
47:27 I think it's a bit better, but it kind of depends where you want to stop at that point.
47:33 The Einstar Vega I'm talking about doesn't have laser scanning, but it is an all-in-one unit which does really fast, efficient structured light scanning, super handy.
47:47 And that's a little step up again from the Rocket, and then you can step up again to the Rigel or the Rigel Lite that they've just released as well, which is an all-in-one laser and structured light scanner.
48:00 And then you can go up from there to a Pro one.
48:03 So, I would say if you compare these two, if you have the budget for it, I think the Rocket is a better scanner.
48:10 But that said, I think you can get perfectly good, if not almost the same results out of the Einstar 2.
48:17 It'll probably just take you a little bit longer to do it, but it definitely matters more about how you know how to process it, and then use those in CAD to get the best results rather than the scanner.
48:29 The scanner is just going to give you a little bit better experience and make your life a bit easier.
48:35 All right, Rookie Cookie again, a question.
48:39 Thought about using baby powder and water spray bottle for scanning instead of using the sticky dots? So, those two things you're talking about are actually kind of completely different functions.
48:53 The baby powder in a water spray bottle or using baby powder is basically a kind of cheaper version of using something like a sub-scanning spray.
49:03 So, the purpose of that is to mat the surface.
49:07 So, if we have reflective surfaces, we spray it on and it gets rid of the reflectiveness.
49:15 If we have a translucent surface, again, spray it on, it makes it opaque.
49:19 And if we have a black surface, they're usually light-colored, those scanning sprays, and you can scan it on it or lighten it up.
49:26 So, that method is... and the baby powder is basically just a cheap kind of option of that because those scanning sprays are really expensive.
49:36 That is more about dealing with troublesome surfaces.
49:40 Scanning targets are not about dealing with troublesome surfaces, they are about tracking.
49:44 So, the scanner understands its position relative to the part, not about capturing the data so much.
49:51 So, two different things.
49:53 Alternative to using this stick-on dots, which is something you kind of used to do more commonly when professional scanners that were... a lot of money would only work on their specific targets that were really fine-tuned into it.
50:08 And these scanning companies that are selling these really expensive scanners wanted a couple of hundred dollars for a little box of stickers like this.
50:16 It was really frustrating.
50:17 So, what you'd do instead is just add texture features to your part.
50:25 So, even if that was...
50:26 If it's something that you could draw on with a whiteboard marker that you can remove afterwards, or ripping off small pieces of masking tape and, so on and sticking them on, that can be a really good way to do it.
50:38 Adding more features that the scanner can track is always good.
50:43 The markers are just a good way of doing it.
50:45 And now if we look at the case that the rocket comes in here, they provide, you know, so many of those markers and they're also, so much cheaper and easier to get.
50:59 And the scanner is looking for these exactly and it's kind of programmed to work with it.
51:04 And in the software, it's a lot easier to kind of remove that.
51:07 So, it kind of is handy to use those markers where you can.
51:13 All right.
51:13 A.
51:14 Daniel H.
51:14 What materials will the scanner have most difficulty picking up? So, if we talk about scanning car parts, for example, just anything shiny or translucent or black is usually difficult, but the laser scanner will pick that up better than the structured light scanner.
51:37 Generally, if we think about that for car parts, generally, if we're scanning the outside of a vehicle with shiny paint or something, it can kind of reflect off that and be quite difficult.
51:52 Scanning windows, which are generally going to be black or a dark color and translucent and reflective can be really difficult.
52:00 So, things like that.
52:01 But yeah, it's usually shiny stuff, shiny black things that trip it up.
52:09 But again, use things like scanning spray or the baby powder or talcum powder to dust over it is a good way to do it.
52:18 I used to use a colored hairspray that kids use doing like fancy dress or something.
52:26 And that is a good way to spray that on.
52:30 And it's easy to wipe that off with water at the end.
52:34 Obviously, the scanning sprays are great.
52:36 They're expensive.
52:38 The dedicated ones like the Asub one, you can spray it on and it will basically after an hour or, so just kind of evaporate off by itself.
52:46 And they're also proven to be kind of good with electronics and things like that.
52:50 So, it won't damage the materials you're spraying it onto.
52:53 You just got to be careful if you're using something else not to damage it.
52:56 The other thing you can wipe on like a wax, like what you, you know, wax your car with.
53:05 And as that hazes up, that can do a good job of just removing the reflection off the surface as well.
53:11 All right, that comes to the end of the questions.
53:16 We've actually completed a giveaway last week, I think with the Einstar 2.
53:23 If you're not familiar, we run giveaways every couple of weeks and you can win anything from pistons for your car or standalone ECUs and, so on.
53:33 And we've been giving away 3D scanners as well.
53:37 So, like I said, the Einstar 2 has already been given away in one of those drawers, but the Rocket giveaway is going to be live in July.
53:46 So, just watch out for that.
53:50 HPacademy.com forward slash giveaway, I think is the link, but Jayden will drop that into the chat.
53:58 And also he, then you'll be able to basically go to that link and save it and then go back in July if you want your chance to win that or whatever comes up in the meantime.
54:09 There is one more question here from a Daniel H.
54:13 Does the program save your process as you scan? It saves it at certain parts, but I don't think it automatically saves the whole way through.
54:26 I've definitely had times, especially when we're running this streaming kind of software and so on where it's quite hard on the computer and it does cause the program to crash and then I lose everything.
54:40 Yeah, it's not the most refined software I'd say, but it's a lot better than what I've found from some of the other cheaper scanners.
54:49 All right, last question here, HSK6077.
54:54 Would these work well in scanning rubber moldings such as around doors and windows, trunk, etc? Yeah, definitely would.
55:04 Rubber moldings tend to be kind of a matted surface finish and not too dark, so I find it scans it pretty well.
55:11 I'll just say because they're relatively kind of long with the geometry over the span of the scanner's field of view tends to look quite the same, so you're going to want to add something to it as you're scanning them like tracking targets or at least some features for it to pick up on because otherwise as you work along it's just going to kind of get confused and at best case your accuracy is just going to go out the window.
55:41 At worst case it's just not going to scan it very well.
55:44 So, hopefully that kind of points you in the right direction there.
55:47 And that's the end of the questions.
55:49 Hopefully, this has given you guys some insight into these two new scanners from Shining3D but also just generally laser scanning and kind of the current market for accessible 3D scanners and how we can use them for our stuff and how relatively simple it is.
56:08 We do have our 3D modeling CAD for Motorsport course, but we also have our practical 3D scanning course which dives a lot deeper into all these topics and how to do all this stuff at a lot slower and more digestible rate.
56:21 So, if you're interested in that as always please check that out.
56:26 But we'll wrap up there.
56:27 Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week with another webinar.