Transcript:
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another 3D Revolution. In this video, I’m going to be showing you how you can. 3D scan objects in the real world using an Xbox 360 Kinect. There are several different ways of generating a digital 3D model from a real world object, each have their own advantages and disadvantages. You could buy an Xbox 360 Kinect, which costs less than 15 pounds. Online is easy to set up and use and gives pretty good results; you could do photogrammetry, which involves taking photos of an object from every different angle and using some clever software to generate a model from them. You could use a handheld 3d scanner and then there’s also industrial. 3D scanners. Now, if you’re watching this video, you’re probably just doing this for home projects, and you’re most likely going to be looking at using a Kinect or photogrammetry. For this video, I’m focusing exclusively on using a Kinect, but subscribe to my channel. I’ll soon be uploading a tutorial video on how to do photogrammetry, as well as a comparison video looking on the differences and advantages for each method. And what may be most suitable for you. When you’re 3d scanning with Xbox Kinect, there’s a few options to choose from when deciding which software to use. I’ll be using a scan 3d for this video in this video. I’ll take you through every step of 3d scanning an object with an Xbox Kinect, this will include preparing your object for 3d scanning, setting up your Kinect looking at the software, The scanning itself cleaning up your scan and finally exporting a model that could be 3d printed or imported into an animation program. The Kinect can give really good results, especially when you’re scanning the right sort of subject, It can struggle a bit with quite small or detailed objects so to give you the best example of how well it can work for this video. I’ll be scanning my Iron Man helmet, so let’s begin. Place your object in an area. You can easily move all around it or place it on a surface you can rotate so you can scan it from every angle. I’m using this lazy Susan For my Iron Man. Helmet, Light your model as evenly as possible. This is less important. If you’re not going to be using the photo texture on your model. But it will still help improve the performance of your 3d scan. Once your Kinect is plugged into the mains as well as a USB port. In your computer, you should see a live feed of the video on the right hand side of K-scan. If you don’t. And if the Scan button on the top-left is grayed out, click devices and then reconnect This forces K-Scan to search for compatible devices connected to your computer and should bring up a live feed from your Kinect. If it does, you can click back to projects. For a high-quality scan, we’re going to need to view our model from as many angles as possible so to begin with. Set up your Kinect at a 45 degree angle. Looking down on your object. Now let’s take a look What the Kinect is actually seeing and adjust it. So it’s ready for the scan. If you look at the live preview on the right hand side here, you’ll see a lot of black patches. These are areas where the scanner isn’t correctly picking up the information it needs. Ideally, your object should be 50 cm away from your scanner. So if you move your Kinect back, you can see these black patches disappear and you get a much cleaner image. Now, at the top, you have bars, which are just what area your scan is actually looking at. The top two sliders crop, your image. Reducing the amount of data, your connectors receiving the bottom two do the same, but in depth, so the distance between your Kinect and the far wall You can use these sliders to make sure your Kinect is focusing just on the subject matter. You want to scan, however, as we’re going to be cleaning up our scans. Anyway, we may as well leave these all at their full parameters to make sure we capture every bit of detail we need. Now everything set up and ready to go. We can get ready to scan. If you make sure you’re in the scanning tab in the top left and then go to the meshing window below this top drop down should have three options: mesh points and capture only. Mesh will capture each scan, convert it into a mesh and try and align it with the previous one’s points will do the same thing, but instead of converting it to a mesh, it will remain as a points cloud capture. Only is the option we’re going to be using. This won’t try and align the images as we go and we can align them. After we finished our scan, ensuring that nothing accidentally gets misplaced. When using capture only the alignment and density modes are grayed out and these aren’t features. Were going to need to use today. Underneath this, you’ll see the scanning window. The first option here is enable batch scanning. This can be really useful if you’re doing a scan of an object, which you need to walk physically around as you can set up, How many scans that you want it to do? And how often you want, it’s capture them. This means that you can walk around the object and allow the Kinect to automatically take the scans one by one. However, when you’re rotating your object and your Kinect is staying in the same spot, I personally find it much easier to manually Click scan each time. I wanted to take an image. If I click this now, you’ll see a scan appears in the column on the right. To manually click scan without having to run back to my computer from the object each time. I just use a wireless mouse. Now let’s get scanning. This is the easiest step. Simply click scan. Rotate your model slightly. Click scan again and repeat this until you’ve done a full rotation of your model. As you do this, you’ll notice each of your scans appearing in the list on the left hand side of the screen. Next, move your Kinect down to the same height as your object do another rotation of scanning and finally move it down to a lower point than your object and do a final rotation of scanning this way. You’ve scanned your object from three different heights. Now your scan is complete. You’ll see a full list of all your captured images on the left hand side. You can reveal & hide these using the tick boxes to the left. We’re now going to go through these one by one and delete anything that isn’t part of the object. We want to actually capture. You can move around just by clicking and dragging with the left hand of the mouse To delete an area. Simply hold ctrl and then draw with your left mouse. If you select an area like this and then click delete in the keyboard, it will just remove it from the point cloud. Rotate the point cloud and delete anything that isn’t part of the model. You want to capture once you’re happy with an individual image, you can click the tick box again to hide it and click. Save You can then move on to the next one. Now repeat the same task for every image that you’ve captured for this scan. This can take some time, but it’s definitely worth it as this could make a massive difference when you’re aligning your images ready for your final model. Reveal all of your scans at the same time by selecting one pressing ctrl+A and then clicking one of these tick boxes. You’ll reveal the entire point map here, but you can see at the moment. They’re all misaligned. Navigate to the mesh editor tab at the top and click the build button. They should take each of your scans in turn and try and align them with a previous one. You should now see your model start to take shape now. Don’t be alarmed if your model looks like some sort of weird camouflage. This is absolutely normal as what you’re seeing. Here is every one of your scans layered one on top of the other. The software’s not quite sure which one’s prioritize and as a result. You get this weird, mottled effect, but this won’t be there in the final model. What you can do is use the smooth option on the left hand side here, which will help remove any sharp edges, which are currently showing on your model. Once you’re happy with your layout, click the combine button at the top. This will do a final aligning of all of your scans and merge them into one final collaborated image. This isn’t your final model. So don’t worry that it still looks a bit bumpy and lumpy. All we need to do now is click the finalize button and this will generate our final model, which we can then export. You always want mesh density as high as possible to ensure a decent quality model, but hole filling may depend on. If your model already has holes in it that you don’t want to lose once you’re happy, though click. OK, and it’ll generate your final model. And there you have it. There is our 3D scanned Iron Man helmet. I personally think that for a £15 piece of equipment. This is an amazing result. Now you can see that at the bottom there. It’s still open, but that’s something that can easily be fixed in something like mesh mixer, which has an easy-to-use hole closing system. To export, simply go up to the export button, select wherever you’d like to save it to and click, OK. Well, I hope this video has helped you better understand how to 3D scan objects with an Xbox Kinect. Remember, I’m going to be uploading a tutorial soon on how to do photogrammetry as well as a comparison video between the two. So make sure you subscribe to my channel and I’ll see you next time. Thanks for watching and remember, hit subscribe for more news tips and livestreams on everything, 3D and tech.