Slashdot Mirror
Build a Rotisserie Scanner With Legos
WalkingBear writes "All you 3d geeks out there should take a look at this. This guy has built a 3d scanner (scans 3d objects resulting in a 2d cylindrical image map) out of a flat bed scanner and Lego. Also has a turntable style for use with digital cameras."
That inner page of his is like 660KB all in, so I can see this guy's server taking a crunch real soon. His JPEGs were uber-unoptimized, so I've optimized them and put up a temporary mirror so you can all see the joy that is the rotissery scanner :-) It will disappear in a few hours or so.
Rotissery Scanner Mirror
The funny thing is, if you read the article you'll see that he's gotten better results by just stitching digital photos together. The scanner has actually given him rather poor images (he's got a nasty light leak), and you need to be able to put the thing you're scanning on a spit...
...could deproject the scanned image to represent the object from an arbitrary angle, or create an ultra-smooth animation of it rotating about the scanned axis. It's the exact analog of the way a QTVR cylindrical panorama is rendered into a window, only there you're inside the object instead of outside.
This technique could be incredibly useful for creating photorealistic views of 3D objects from any angle about one axis.
Wish I'd thought of it. Now how long until IPIX patents it?
There are two that I know of:
Photomodeller [www.photomodeller.com] - where you specify verticies and edges on a series of photos taken from different perspectives. It will generate the 3d mesh and map the images onto the faces -- good for regularly shaped objects in particular.
The other is D Scupltor from D Vision Works [www.d-vw.com] where you take photos from regular angles of an object (using a rotating turntable such as he has built) and reference markers in the image. The software will then generate a complete mesh and map the images to it.
at this link. Check his mathematical lego sculptures. It was covered in a slashdot article too.
If you look all the way to the bottom, he takes that creepy warped skull image and wraps it on a 3D model to make something that almost looks like a 3D skull. It looks kind of crummy, but it's decent for a start, and much better than anything I've done in the same field (absolutely nothing).
He never explicitly says what his purpose in all this was (although he claims inspiration from the Matrix), but I guess he's wanting to use this to make it easier to get textures for 3D objects based on actual objects.
The scanner in no way reads depths though... the 3D model he uses in the end is NOT determined by the scanner. That would take a hell of a lot more work, and probably lots of those 2x1 blocks that always seem to run out.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH