Artec 3D announced a major upgrade to their Spider series of professional 3D scanners.
The new Spider II scanner is designed to easily capture highly complex objects at a high level of detail. It also does not require the use of targets, which can be quite laborious to apply to and remove from a subject.
The Spider II enhancements focus on making the scanning process easier through a variety of technological improvements.
One enhancement is a larger field of view. This is the “active” area that the scanner sees as it is swept along a subject. The FOV is now 171 x 152 mm in area.
Another improvement is the scanning speed, which is now up to 30 frames per second. This specification is important as the faster the FPS, the faster the operator can move along the subject’s surface. Faster scanning!
Artec 3D has also reduced the weight of the Spider II, making it only 950g. This should make it easier for operators when scanning very large items requiring longer handheld intervals.
Artec 3D explained that the Spider II is much more capable of capturing dark and reflective surfaces, which are usually quite challenging to scan.
The accuracy and resolution of the Spider II is said to be 0.05mm, which is quite tight. They also say the Spider II can even capture geometry in deep holes, likely a side effect of the increased resolution.
The increased resolution means there’s a lot more data to be transferred from the scanner to the processing software. They’ve considered this and include a Thunderbolt interface for high-speed data transfer.
Artec 3D also announced Artec Studio 19, the latest version of the powerful scanning software. It’s designed to work with their entire line of 3D scanners and can quickly produce highly detailed 3D models from scan data. I’ve used this software myself, although an earlier version, and found it was straightforward to produce great 3D models.
There is a very unusual new feature in Artec Studio 19, however: photogrammetry.
Photogrammetry is another method of 3D scanning that involves taking still 2D images of a subject from a variety of angles, and then using a software algorithm to interpret a 3D shape from the images. Typically, it’s used by operators that don’t have a professional scanner but do have a camera. Normally, they would use a software tool to perform the processing of the images.
Artec Studio is nominally designed to service Artec 3D scanners that don’t use photogrammetry — they use structured light and other methods to capture 3D data. Why would photogrammetry be included as a new feature in Artec Studio?
The idea is to get the best of both worlds, as the photogrammetry data can be integrated at the mesh stage of scan processing. It’s also possible to simply use Artec Studio 19 to process images and videos using photogrammetry without any Artec 3D scanners involved at all. This puts Artec 3D in direct competition with photogrammetry applications such as Agisoft Metashape, Mushroom, Autodesk ReCap Pro, RealityCapture, and others.
It also simplifies the environment for organizations that use both handheld 3D scanners and photogrammetry: only one software tool is required.
Via Artec 3D
