[SML] Canvas 3D modeling software

[Joe D]

The company I work for installs large industrial refrigeration chambers (think room, up to warehouse sized freezers).  I would love to be able to do a simple scan of an existing facility.  But, when I spoke to some vendors about the type of sensor used by the Canvas program, they said that it is not nearly accurate enough.  It is not so much that an individual scan is inaccurate, but that as you try to "paint" a large area, the errors accumulate as each scan is added to the prior one.  While there is some effort to reconcile the final scan to the first, I was advised that the results are not useful at the scale of a warehouse.

And for us, another issue is that we want to capture smaller profile objects, such as the roofing trusses.  I don't need every detail, but this type of scanner would not necessarily show the existence of the roof trusses at all !

To be able to "see" a roof truss, I think I would need a laser line generator type of scanner.  I don't think such hardware should be expensive.  But, I have never seen anything like this, designed for large room and warehouse scale scans, at any price.

While my earlier description of a "Scan your paint-Choose a color-Generate a mix formula" software idea has not generated any interested yet, I will go ahead and propose my laser scanner idea, in case someone picks it up, and makes what I want!

There exist these types of laser scanners for small scale objects. It is typically a camera mounted together with a laser line generator.  Sometimes the object rotates in front of it.

I propose that the camera and laser sit on a tripod base, and this arrangement rotates around.  It may be able to obtain 5 or 10 degrees vertically of data. As each rotation is complete, it shifts its aim a bit higher.  One complication is that the laser and camera must be separated, and aimed somewhat "cross-eyed". This means that the scanner has a specific range. The further the two are separated, the more accurate the scan becomes. This separation needs to be increased as the scanned object is further away. Likewise, the zoom of the camera lens may also need to be changed. The zoom lens is probably a bigger expense, but lasers are cheap. So, it might just have multiple lasers at different distances.  A Red and Green color scan could be done at once.  The user might manually change the camera lens, and perhaps move lasers to make coarse changes to the range as well.

-Joe