at least paint/seal all parts from the ambient elements like we did model cars as kids.

Anyway, I never succeeded to have a high quality result as you can have, Pirvan. The last one is almost perfect, well done.

One more remark: calibration is difficult, and not permanent. I have to re-calibrate the lasers after one or more days without use. I suppose this is due to ambiant temperature variations. But it quickly becomes an easy thing to do :-).

I'll try to continue to give a feedback as soon as I have made some progress with my Atlas 3D.

If these scans are mostly for printing, why does it matter if you have color data? Most can only print in one color anyways. I would sacrifice color for precision any day.

If you put a band pass filter on your camera that passes only 365nm or 380nm depending on the type of laser diodes being used you would get no noise from ambient light reflections. That frequency is found in very few sources of natural light and is do narrow and of low amplitude it is nearly undetectable by cameras with band pass filters. Only lasers can generate a sufficient amount of it to be detected. I did holigraphy for five years and am very familiar with that small line of the visual spectrum.

true thats how laser and IR can be used to transfer digital data due to fine defined light waves like for fiber optics and pulses

If you put a band pass filter on your camera that passes only 365nm (Correction, should be 635nm) or 640nm depending on the type of laser diodes being used you would get no noise from ambient light reflections. That frequency is found in very few sources of natural light and is so narrow and of low amplitude it is nearly undetectable by cameras with band pass filters. Only lasers can generate a sufficient amount of it to be detected. I did holography for five years and am very familiar with that small line of the visual spectrum.

Also white light is all colors combined, so even if you filter only red light, you'll still catch a reflection from white light since red is included in white.

I'll do a lot of other tests, for sure. I'll buy also a RGB LED strip to be able to change the light, and I'll try to resorb reflections with talcum or tanning powder. I'll keep you informed. Once again, thanks a lot fo the help.

Pirvan, what are generally your parameters for your scans? High res and both lasers? What threshold for the laser? Only one table revolution?

think I will make a tent to use it in for better control of light also

PS like homers halo lol

For my scans, instead of the liner that came with the scanner, I'm using a piece of double face tape (carpet mounting tape works great and it's very thin).

• The calibration grid is fine to get everything lined up mechanically, but you should also use the Auto-calibration after that.  Some of your models look like mine before auto-calibration was introduced.

• If you haven't already done so, upgrade to the latest version (v.1.9).

• My LED's are RGB, so I can change their color.  I found that, if you have a lot of white or light blue or green  colors in your model, putting a yellow/orange light on helps the camera see the laser better.  On very red, dark orange and brown colors, I use a green/yellow light.  Bright white doesn't usually yield good scans.

• There is no such thing as a common denominator in terms of settings which will work across the board.  At a minimum you'll have to adjust the laser threshold.

• Reflective surfaces are the root of all evil.  I used talcum/baby powder, and lately I've used (stolen) my wife's makeup kit and I use tanning powder applied with a makeup brush to darken the light surfaces and cut down the reflection and glare.

Even with all these preparations, I still end up doing 3-4 tries before I get a usable scan.  Also there's always a lot of clean up to do to the point cloud. 

You can adjust the light and laser threshold until it gets rid of most of the noise (stray pixels), but then you'll also loose a lot of details in the dark areas of your model.  When you adjust the threshold to pick up all that detail, you will inevitably pick up a lot of noise.   It's just nature of the beast.

But with some patience, and some post-scan clean up work, I'm sure you'll be able to achieve some nice results.

Also, you have a reflection on the model, flat lighting will prevent the reflection. You can do this with tissue paper over light sources or bounced lighting. In addition, consider reducing the shine on the object using some talcom powder to soften the reflection.

If your light source is coming from the right, maybe rotating the scanner 90 degrees left would help.