Scanning a person

Question

What's the best way to scan a person?

Answer

Here are some tips that should help you achieve a good scan of a person.

• It's best to have even, ambient lighting in the room, especially in terms of capturing good texture / vertex color data.
• Assuming the person will be standing, it's best if he or she stands away from walls, or objects such as furniture or equipment, for two reasons:
  1. Walls and objects can interfere with the automatic mesh alignment process if they're part of the scan captures. If necessary, you may want to adjust the Z Range slider to the left in order to crop away any background data.
  2. You'll be moving around the person with the sensor. If your computer is relatively far away from the person, you might want to use a USB 2.0 extension cable.
• During the scanning process, you want to hold the sensor as close to the person as possible before the images in the live feed start clipping out. Also, make sure the Z Minimum slider in KScan3D is all the way to the left. Although you might be tempted to capture as much of the person as possible with each scan by holding the scanner farther from the person, the quality of the data (the amount of details) and the ability for KScan3D to automatically align meshes decreases with distance.
• For scanning people, a good workflow to use is the "Capture Only" method. See Rapid Point Cloud Capture in the manual.
• Keep in mind you can capture several groups of scans at a time. So if you capture 50 scans and get about half of the person, you can press the SCAN button again and capture another 50 scans of the other half. Just make sure the person is holding as still as possible throughout the entire process.
• If you see that scans aren't aligning properly using the automatic mesh alignment process that happens when you press the Build button in the Point Cloud Meshing panel, try the following:
  1. Abort the process.
  2. Combine the properly aligned meshes.
  3. Continue the process with the remaining point clouds.
  4. Combine those meshes.
  5. Once you have two or more groups of combined meshes, manually rotate each group and align it with the first group by pressing the Align button.
  6. Combine the groups into one single group.
  Remember that you can manually align individual meshes that haven't automatically aligned properly. Just make sure these meshes or point clouds are unlocked first so you can move and rotate them, and then press the Align button. They should then align with the other aligned meshes.