OpenScan

The dinosaur example lists an iPhone as source and none of their scanner models. It is also saying that it was recorded at a dinosaur theme park in Germany. This one might be meters long.

In that case I think you just take hundreds of photos by hand, probably with software which varies the focus as you take them so everything has a chance to be in focus.

The device is a way to automake taking those ~300 photos (number from the marigold example).

scanning furniture is quite a challenge for photogrammetry. your best option would be NERF or Gaussian splatting and manually guiding the camera.

I bought the OpenScan Mini kit for €170 a few years ago, mostly just to play with it. I've tried scanning things like

- flowers

- dead beetles

- model soldiers / Warhammer

- board game components

The examples are all better than I've achieved, and I could probably improve, but it's a fairly slow process, and difficult to know what to do to get better results. The Openscan Classic has a static model and the camera moves around, which would reduce vibrations and probably helps. Maybe using a professional camera would help too.

If the target isn't naturally 'rough' like a flower or stone, you need to add dots so the photogrammetry has something to align upon. I bought a professional scanning spray, which makes white dots which sublime after a while, but unfortunately it sublimes far too quickly — before the scan is completed. It's probably intended for use in an unheated workshop (e.g. scan a car for designing one of those wrap-around plastic banners).

I got the best results airbrushing white/black paint onto the Warhammer figure, but that's only acceptable if it's not yet been painted.

The kit itself is a bit janky, though mine is 3 years old now. I think the photogrammetry service is the most important part, and you should note it's not open source. When you purchase the kit you get a decent amount of credit to use the service, and can buy more credit as required. I quickly gave up trying to set up open source photogrammetry software, as so far I haven't needed to top-up the credit anyway.

Not sure about price vs other options but note that for the $244 price you have to 3d print your own parts and supply your own rPi etc

I don’t think there are even any options in this price range from any reputable brand (Creality, Revopoint, etc.).

the Lidar on the phone is only suited for medium/large objects (>50-100cm). but you are absolutely right about the lowest cost hardware option. The thought behind the scanner is having a self-contained unit which of course increases the cost.

I'd imagine at some point the rig tolerances/vibrations/newly settled dust specks from snapshot to snapshot would completely negate any benefits you'd get from that level of detail. The processing power to handle that resolution would be a huge (but potentially interesting...) problem as well.

Cannon pixels are still pretty big. You could use an astronomy camera and some lens adapters to get better sampling.

The OpenScanCloud is just a convenience solution and most photogrammetry pipelines will outperform it. Meshroom is a fully open-source alternative (which needs quite some fiddeling...). And EpicGames just release RealityScan free for individual usage which is a state-of-the-art photogrammetry solution. I just created the cloud solution as an alternative for people getting into the topic, which either do not have the right hardware or maybe do not want to deal with yet another program.

If you click the links "original model by ..." you can pan/zoom the model on the Sketchfab website.

This is the first example, the butterfly: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/papilio-cresphontes-giant-sw...