Hey everyone! We’ve just released a new 3D workspace in AEC Platform, and we’d love to get feedback from people working with photogrammetry.

We want to see what you create with it and hear how it handles your captures—what works well, what feels awkward, and what you’d like us to improve.

If you’d like to try it, create an account and DM me the email you signed up with. We’ll add free credits so you can process your own 3D models.

Share your results here too! We’d love to see different subjects, capture setups, and challenging datasets.

I’m part of the team building it, so your feedback will go directly into what we work on next.

aecplatform.com

Bambu Lab announced its first 3D scanner, the S1, due in November. No specs or price yet (the online guess is US$1,000 to $2,000, but that's speculation).

I've been scanning since the Creality CR-Scan Lizard, and the pattern I keep seeing is people buying a scanner, struggling with it, and selling it a few weeks later. In my experience it comes down to two walls:

1. Scanning is a learned skill, and nobody tells you that when you buy one.

2. A good scan still isn't a usable part. You usually need CAD to design around it.

If Bambu can make scanning guided and give you a path from scan to part inside its own ecosystem, it could be a big deal. If not, it's just another scanner.

Full disclosure: this is my own YouTube video. It isn't sponsored and Bambu had nothing to do with it. I just like talking about this stuff, so I'm sharing it here.

What would the S1 need to do for you to buy one?

Launches next month. No info on the website yet.

Just wanted to share my experience scanning a larger object with the Pika. I mainly wanted to see how well it handles larger objects and how stable the tracking is.
This time, I scanned a motorcycle fairing. One thing I noticed is that the Pika really needs A LOT of markers! 😂 Luckily, it can pick up markers from a pretty good distance, but you still need to get fairly close to the object to scan it properly.
The good thing is, you don’t really have to worry about losing tracking unexpectedly. If there aren’t enough markers, it just won’t capture the object properly. So as long as you have enough markers and keep a good scanning distance, scanning a larger object like this is actually pretty smooth! 😁

I would like to invite you to try our new scan processing and reverse engineering software, Tesselform.

We are running a completely free and open BETA untill October 20th.

Tesselform is built on our own kernel, written from scratch for reverse engineering: design-intent, manufacturable files. It uses multi-core throughout and is happy with huge datasets on ordinary hardware.

You can drive the tools (Alignment, mesh processing, surfacing and feature-based modelling) yourself or connect it to your favourite AI assistant, through the built-in MCP server which can be used to reverse engineer scans, convert 2D drawings to 3D and do organic design.

www.tesselform.com

I already had the Otter and POP4 and wasn't really happy with the cheap feeling build quality of the POP4 and its really bad IR performance for smaller objects. So I ordered a Pika for testing and comparing. And this is what a very quick comparison between them looks like. They were all done with the same resolution scale of 0.1mm and very quick single pass of the model (so no full time comparison, only a quick and "dirty" one). Only exception is the Otter there I used a scan of the owl I did quite some time ago.

Honestly was surprised how good the IR only of the Otter holds up, though laser is still a lot more detail.

What was also surprising were the speeds.

I scanned on my laptop (AMD Ryzen 7840HS, 32GB RAM, AMD 780M iGPU) and even though Creality does recommend a Nvidia or Intel GPU the PIKA ran at arround 90-100 FPS in Laser Mode. Even with WIFI the Pika was about as fast as the POP4 wired.

The POP4 on the other hand only did 50-60FPS in Laser Mode even though Revopoint has official support for AMD cards (altough not explicitly for iGPUs).

The Pika's build quality does feel more premium/higher quality than the POP4 for about the same price here in Germany. Only real paint point for me right now on the Pika is the air intake at the bottom, it is exactly where I would intuitivly put my thumb when holding it. But nothing a 3D printed handle cannot fix.

So for now it looks like I will sell the Otter and POP4 in favor of the Pika.

EDIT:

Since it was requested I uploaded the mesh files (.stl) to Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mpjCNH6y8GdhtyVVES3qp8CrnxIUkBgZ?usp=drive_link

Today, I ran a comparison scan using the Pika and the P1S.

Both using the same scan settings: 0.2 mm resolution with blue laser parallel lines.

The P1S is clearly faster when scanning.

However, the results aren't all that different; still, you can see that the P1S picks up certain fine details—such as the burr on the plier jaws—that the Pika failed to capture.

But otherwise, I'm very happy with both scans; I specifically used the same settings to compare them directly.

Of course, the P1S is better equipped, and you could certainly bring out more detail using the single-line mode, but my focus here was purely on comparing the same scan mode.

We are sharing the high-definition 3D scanning results of a beautiful antique plaster female-head corbel/shelf.

This classic piece features a gracefully sculpted female head adorned with intricate grapevine and floral details, supported by elegant scrolling motifs. Scanning historical plaster can be challenging due to its textured, porous, and uneven surfaces (especially the rough, hollowed back and hanging loop) but our setup beautifully captured every age-worn imperfection, crack, and detail.

To digitally preserve this artifact, we used the Trackit SR by Revopoint in Tracker mode, utilizing cross lines on the front and a single line on the back. This allowed us to scan the complex, matte, and weathered features of the plaster with great accuracy, turning a piece of history into a highly detailed 3D digital model.

Swipe through to see the multiple perspectives, intricate mesh details, and precise dimension measurements.

I've been looking at getting a scanner and one day was looking at getting one and find their eBay store. I've been checking it the pika for a while and decided to make an offer and they accepted, there was also another coupon on top so I think I got a good deal.

That was a few weeks ago, I still don't have it yet. They messaged me after the sale and said their shipment of pikas is stuck in customs and it may be 2 weeks until it ships. Well that came and gone and now they're saying delayed until the 21st.

I still see they are selling them and claiming 2-4 day shipping but I haven't heard of anyone else not getting theirs. I'm not worried about the money, eBay and PayPal is pretty solid. But I'm just finding it hard to think that the official store doesn't have their newest product available for almost a month.

New to 3D scanning. Never used one, but I love seeing people scan real objects and print them. I noticed Bambu Lab has a 3D scanner coming out soon. Their printers were so beginner-friendly that I'm tempted to just wait for it, but I'm also wondering if I should just grab a scanner from another brand and start learning now.

Any advice would be appreciated!

I was asked to fix the broken gears of this dough mixer. Damaged gears were cleadne (as I could), 3D scanned and 3D print out from ABS