Like Photography years ago, 3D Scanning — or, more broadly known as Reality Capture — has become affordable for consumers and small businesses. While professional grade 3D scanners are still expensive, two technologies that are commonly used for 3D scanning on a budget are Depth Sensor based 3D Scanning and Photogrammetry, which uses a regular camera and special software.

But like Photography, buying just a scanning device and software might be enough for hobbyists but won’t give the best results. If you want to make 3D scans for professional purposes, you need to invest in some extra equipment to populate your (mobile) 3D scanning studio. Luckily, these can be found for prices that match the affordable scanning hardware and software.

My definition of affordable for this post is using hardware and software that won’t exceed an investment of $1000 (not counting a computer of tablet you probably already have).

Further down this post you’ll find a selection of essential products that I actually use myself to make many of the 3D captures you see on this website. And I’ve taken the time to search for the best deals, so you don’t have to.

But if you haven’t done so already, you should first choose which 3D capture technology you’re going to use.

Depth Sensor Scanning
vs. Photogrammetry

Using a depth sensor or going for photogrammetry is not an easy choice to make. In fact, I advice to get experience with both approaches so you’ll get a good feel of which technique is best suitable for each project you encounter. To help you, I’ve summarized the differences between the two technologies:

Using a Depth Sensor for 3D Scanning

First of all, let’s take a look at what it looks like in reality and what you’ll see in a typical depth sensor scanning program:

In my opinion, sensor scanning is what you should start with if you’re totally new to 3D scanning and haven’t got a lot of experience with technology in general or photography. You won’t get the very best scan quality but the results are light-weight (small file size and low memory usage). This makes them suitable for many (realtime) 3D purposes. The hardware is fool proof and the software is very user friendly. You don’t have to worry about the background behind your object and it will give an interactive preview of the scanning progress. Scanning is fast (under two minutes for a typical session) which makes it the best way to capture people on a budget. Processing is also fast so don’t need a very fast computer or tablet.

Typical uses of depth sensor scanning are capturing people and body parts (for both aesthetic and measurement purposes), objects to use as low-poly assets in games and VR/AR experiences (for reference or actual use), rooms (measurements only).

Below is the result from the Sense 2 from the video above. Click on the gear icon and select Rendering > MatCap to view the geometry without textures.

Single-Camera Photogrammetry

You can start experimenting with Photogrammetry if you have some experience with photography and manual camera settings (even if you plan to use a smartphone) — and don’t mind that your first attempts will fail. There’s a learning curve but once you gain some experience, photogrammetry can generate very impressively detailed 3D models — both for textures and geometry. The object size and capture range is merely limited by what’s physically possible to capture. With the right camera and lens you can capture anything from a toy to a large statue. By using a camera drone you can even capture entire buildings.

Photogrammetry is not the holy grail of 3D capture and is limited to objects (or environments) that have a lot of visual detail and it doesn’t like movement — either of the subject or the background. This means that single-camera Photogrammetry is not a great idea for capturing people since they won’t be able to stand totally still long enough. It’s also not suitable for objects with a lot of large, flat surfaces, like furniture.

Typical uses of single-camera Photogrammetry are capturing statues of all sizes (cultural heritage, toys), organic objects (archaeology, nature documentation), high-quality 3D asset creation for games and VFX, areal surveying.

Below is the result from the photo shoot above, processed with the Free version of ReMake (standard Quality). Again, click on the gear icon and select Rendering > MatCap to view the geometry without textures.

More Detailed Pros and Cons for if you’re not in a hurry

Essential Stuff for your
3D Scanning Studio

Now that you’ve made up your mind about using a sensor or photogrammetry, let me guide you through all the other hardware that will make the difference between a hobbyist’s scan and one that looks great!

1. Light, Light & Light

While industrial-grade 3D Scanners usually have a build in LED light source, affordable infrared depth sensors haven’t. This means the scan quality will greatly depend on the lighting conditions. For photogrammetry the solution is simple: capture your subject outdoors, preferably on an overcast day for nice, diffuse lighting. If you have a 3D scanner that projects a visible line of laser light, scanning outside might also work. But if your scanner uses invisible, infrared light, you’re bound to scan indoors.

But in many cases you’ll want to scan indoors anyway to keep control of the lighting. In this case it’s wise to invest in a studio light setup. Not flash lights for photography, but permanent lights used for video production. The kits usually come with 3 lights with softboxes on stands. Depending on your budget, you can buy a kit with LED lights or a more affordable version with fluorescent bulbs. The amount of light you need depends on what you want to capture. Just be sure the light temperature is 5500 Kelvin (daylight).

I have three ways to light my 3D scan subjects:

Mobile LED Light

The LED mounted to the headphone jack of an iPad for 3D scanning with Structure Sensor (Review).

The LED mounted to the Tripod Mount of the Sense 2 3D Scanner (Review) with the included adapter.

2. A Turntable

Using a turntable has the big advantage of not having to walk around the subject. This means you’ll need less space and less lights and in some cases your 3D scanner can even be mounted in a fixed position.

Small Manual Turntable (for Depth Sensor)

A Smart, Automatic Turntable (for Photogrammetry)

A Large, Automatic Turntable (for Depth Sensor)

If you want to scan bigger objects or humans, you’ll have to buy something more serious. I own an electric turntable manufactured by Dutch company Pre-Motion, that can hold up to 100 kilograms. They have two versions with different fixed speeds and I tested both to discover that the slowest 0.8 RPM version works great for 3D Scanning. I modded mine by adding a simple foot-operated light switch in the power cord, so I can take my time to scan the front and head of people first and then turn on the turntable with my foot to capture the rest at a comfortable pace (the GIF below is played at 4x the original speed). A turntable like this isn’t very cheap and also isn’t very light (15.5 kilograms), but if you’re going to put people on something that rotates it better be good, right?

3. Markers

To stitch geometry from different angles together into one seamless model, all 3D capturing software use feature detection and tracking to understand which parts need to go where. Some 3D scan solutions use just the geometric features (from the black-and-white Depth Map) for this, while others also use the color information for this (referred to as RGB+Depth tracking). This means that the former method will not be able to capture perfectly smooth globe because of the uniform geometry of a sphere, but the latter can, because it detects unique features of the print.

4. Matting Spray

Both 3D scanning hardware and Photogrammetry-based software solutions rely on computer vision of some kind. They either project visible or invisible light onto an object and capture the result with a camera, or they use software algorithms to estimate depth from images. In all cases, the computer tries to understand what it’s seeing. And computers aren’t smart enough yet to understand a few surface types that humans take for granted: transparency and specularity.

If your want to scan people, you will run into problems with people wearing shiny things like glasses. If you need a 3D model of a person that always wears glasses, you can scan them without their spectacles on and add these in post production. For this you will naturally need a 3D model of the glasses, and 3D scanning them separately is very hard. Luckily, you can find many brands and models on 3D Stock websites like Turbosquid for a reasonable price. Just be sure the file format is compatible with the 3D modeling software you intend to use.

5. A Sketchfab Account

If you want to share your 3D Scans with the world (and don’t have the cash to 3D print all your scans and mail them to your friends and family), there’s only one way to do it in style: Sketchfab. The website has quickly become the YouTube of 3D Models and offers an easy-to-use way to publish and share your 3D scans through the web, social media and even in Virtual Reality (I wrote a tutorial about this). Manually uploading scans isn’t necessary in most cases, because almost every 3D scanning and photogrammetry software can directly publish the result to your Sketchfab account.

It’s free, but I can totally recommend the Pro account if you’re taking yourself and your work seriously (and want to support the development of this great service). The Pro features I use the most (Yes! You can also follow me on Sketchfab) are the ability to publish models privately and change the background to something more branded. Also, some of my scans go beyond the 50MB file size limit of the Free version.

Thanks for reading. I hope this post is useful for you if you’re getting into 3D Scanning (which you should). If you think it would be helpful for your friends and followers, please use one of the buttons to share it on your favorite social network. For this you can use the buttons on the left (desktop) or under (mobile) this post.