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Getting a Good Scan



  • bill nigh

    Are you experienced in mapping an automobile or ceramics? Are they too reflective?
    Thanks !

  • John Meehan

    Are there any recommendations for the brightness of the projected white versus the ambient light? What's the best contrast ratio for a scan? Any guidelines?

    Its hard to tell sometimes why the scan results are poor...  lots of variables .....



  • Roy Whittle

    Design from just a picture.

    I did a scan of a large area but the scan produced no image to design on because the scene was too dark..

    I was able to guess certain areas and although faint the projection worked.

    Designing was not possible because I could not see the scene.

    However. Had I been able to just take a static picture during the day I could have used that to draw shapes upon it using the drawing tools (brush, rectangle, structure).

    Is that an option?

  • Ashley

    Hi Roy, 

    We definitely could show the camera image. In fact, you can load the camera image into Lightform Creator as an asset by going to your saved project folder, going into the scans folder, and finding the image "camera.jpg."

    However, the camera image is not from the same perspective/field of view as the projector. So if you were to use this to author content / draw vectors, and then publish the result, all of the content would be misaligned. All of the vectors would align with the camera's perspective, but this means that the projected result won't line up with the real world.

    This is the greatest value in the scanning process. It attempts to produce an image as if the projector could actually capture an image (which it can't, without Lightform device). This is how we can allow users to draw directly on the image, and have the content appear exactly in the real world as it does on your screen. Authoring in camera space will not achieve this.

    If, however, you want to see what you are doing in the black space as you are doing it in creator, I recommend 1. Toggling on the camera stream within creator (control menu --> toggle camera stream) and then 2. if you turn on the "stream" function with it set to "cursor on" and "mask on" like the screenshot below, you'll be able to see crosshairs show up in your scene and as move your cursor in creator and you can use the surface tools to create surfaces. With stream on, you'll start to see the shapes emerge in your scene as you finish creating surfaces.

    I hope that information is helpful but please let me know if you have other questions or concerns.




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