Revopoint Inspire 3D Scanner

[Rilot]

I'm on the beta for the Revopoint Inspire 3d scanner. Mainly because I've used 3d scanners for years and have a lot of experience with Revopoint products.

The product is on Kickstarter at the moment and so please remeber, backing anything is a risk. However, Revopoint have launched 4 scanners this way in the past and have always delivered.

https://revo.ink/47aJvYQ

I thought my showcases on Revopoint's forums would be of interest to you guys.

Inspire is a lovely little thing and from my time with it, a perfect introduction to scanning. The results you can get with it with very little practice are fantastic, and at the price-point it's launching at on Kickstarter it significantly lowers the cost of entry to this fantastic hobby.

Revopoint have knocked it out of the park.... again.

Some more of Revopoint's scanners. From top to bottom: Range, Pop3, Inspire, Mini

First up, the David sculpture.

Next, I scanned a battery for my DJI Mini 3 Pro:

A battery for a power tool:

A really ugly soft toy

A power tool

I thought I'd try something really smooth so had a go at my headphones case:

Then, as a torture test, one of the earbuds. I'd normally use Mini for something this small but Inspire did really well.

I wanted to try something aluminium and shiny-ish. The spare clutch slave cylinder from my car seemed like a good idea:

Next up, the benchy of the scanning world. A shoe. The colour scan is only vertex colour as I had to do it in multiple sessions and merge.

Another power tool

And finally, a torture test. This a quick-change tool for my lathe. Very shiny with lots of angles. I think Inpire did really well here. The scan isn't going to win a beauty contest but it's dimentionally accurate and good enough to build CAD from.

My hat

My fist

A door wedge

Skull

Human skull

Conch

Sea star

Ram's horn

Plastic toy

Wooden bird

Screwdriver handle

 

[Rilot]

Now a practical application:

I have a DJI Mini 3 Pro which is a fantastic little drone with one flaw; it has no fan and so will overheat and shut down if you try to use it as a ground camera. It has ducts running through the body for cooling but these are only functional when the props are spinning. We need to give it some help.

So, I want to make a mount so that an 80mm fan can blow air down these ducts:

I don’t want to recreate the entire drone in cad. I only want the top surface and the rear arms. So, let’s scan.

The scan is not manifold and has lots of stuff I don’t want. Also, it’s way too detailed.

First, let’s cut it up using the plane cut tool in Revoscan.

Then we fill the holes using the Plane method.

Then simplify the mesh. We’re aiming for 10k triangles or fewer. It looks bad but is perfect for what we’re going to do with it:

We add it in to Fusion 360 and align it to X, Y and Z
Then we go to the Mesh menu and Modify, and Convert.

It will complain that there are too many triangles but after a minute or so, you will have a solid body from your mesh.

I’m not going to go through the design process for the object in Fusion 360 because there are tons of guides on how to CAD and that’s not the purpose of this forum. But, I designed a duct that is approximately the right size. I need it to fit perfectly against the Mini 3 Pro’s body.

We then apply a combine operation, using the scan of the Mini 3 Pro as the tool.

After a few seconds, the part has been chopped to have a perfect outline of the Mini 3 Pro

Over to the 3d printer (a Bambu X1 Carbon in this case) and we have our part:

Looks good, but does it fit?

Perfect!

 

[Rilot]

Another method for getting a scan to CAD is the secioning method.

Let's say we have an assembly we need to draw in CAD

The object I want to create in CAD is in several parts so it’s best to disassemble it and scan the parts individually.

This parts are quite shiny so to give Inpire the very best change of getting a good scan, I apply some scanning spray. This isn’t strictly necessary.

Next, set up your scan. Think about what orientation your object needs to be in to get the best scan of all sides. For this item, vertical seemed like the best way. Also, it’s important to have the David bust watching you as you scan.

In Revoscan 5, I decided to scan this in marker mode as the item is very uniform in shape.

Once you have the object scanned, first fuse it, then tidy up the point cloud using the Isolation, Overlap, Simplify, and Smooth tools. They are pretty self explanatory but some experimentation is advised to get the best scan.

Once we’re happy with the point cloud, we can mesh it and export it as a stl

Next, on to the more complex part. Again, I used marker mode for this.

Due to the shape, I had to scan this at multiple angles. The way I do this is to take 4 seperate scans and then merge them in Revoscan. You could pause the scan and re-position but you would need to scan in feature mode for this to work. I find seperate scans and merge to be more relable.

Once we have our scans, we can clean them up as before using the tools and then hit the Merge button.

This automatically merged in feature mode without issue. You can use marker mode to select various point pairs to use if automatic alignment fails.

And we have our finished scan of the second part

Now, on to Fusion 360. Inset a mesh in to the workspace. I have started with the simple part first.

Next, we need to align the scan with our workspace coordinates. I prefer to do this manually but changing the view between top, side, front, etc. and nudging the model until it’s lined up.

In the mesh workspace, we need to click the Create Mesh Section Sketch button. It may be under the dropdown on your screen though.

Using this, we can create outlines of sections of the model to use as references for our sketches later on.

It’s a good idea to take several of them to cover all the major features.

Once we have our section sketch, right mouse on the sketch in the tree view and select Edit Sketch

Then go up to the Create Menu and select Fit Curves to Section Sketch

From here, you can fit various shapes such as circles, lines, curves, etc. to the sketch to make a fully enclosed sketch.

Once we have the first bit drawn, we can come out and go in to the Solid workspace, and extrude the shape we just drew

Moving on, we repeat the process as many times as necessary to build up the sections of the model

Add a bit of colour, and there we go

Now we follow the exact same process for the second part. This one is more complex and so is trickier to do.

First orient the part

Create section sketches

Extrude

And repeat

Draw some bolts of the correct dimentions and assemble:

And here’s the final assembly, rendered.

 

[Rilot]

It is accurate to 0.2mm. See the part I fitted to the drone above.

 

[Rilot]

That's a bit big for Inspire. For an object of that size you'd really want Range which is another scanner for very large objects.

 

[Rilot]

I mean, you can do it, but you will lose detail the larger the object.

 

[Rilot]

Captain America toy

 

[Rilot]

More more scans.

Mother and child sculpture

 

[Rilot]

Can Inspire do something small? Like 3cm small? Yes, yes it can. Not brilliant but good enough. Ideally I'd use Revopoint Mini for this but Inspire did a reasonable job.

 

[Rilot]

A bag of flour

 

[Rilot]

A large Super Soaker water gun. 32cm long.

 

[Rilot]

How does it scan the inside of the gun to get all the moving parts? Does it have xray scanner built in?

It doesn't. If you want to do that then you will need to disassemble it.

 

[Rilot]