Scanning Supercars

By Patrice Parent

Supercars are high-performance, street-legal sports cars designed to fulfill the fantasies of the wealthy while eliciting awe and envy in the rest of us. They are typically exotic and rare, and one New Zealand company has recently filled a perceived gap in the competitive yet potentially highly profitable international supercar market with its own specimen.

< < A fast scanning method was used to duplicate this fast Hulme F1, a handmade supercar.

> > The author demonstrates the proper use of the Creaform HandyScan 3D to the staff at ScaNZ 3D in New Zealand.

We were able to cut the typical scanning time by using two HandyScan 3D units to scan different parts of the car simultaneously, which is one unique feature of our system. It allows the user to easily register scans under a common reference or coordinate system. This is possible because one single mapping file (positioning features file) is created, copied, and then opened by the VxScan software resident in two separate computers. Since the coordinate system of the scan was directly linked to the positioning file, using the same file with two scanners would generate scans that were in the same coordinate system and therefore correctly aligned in relation to each other.

We used targets or positioning features to position the scanner in space. These reflective and self-adhesive targets are manually affixed to the surface of the object and are used by the cameras in the scanner to create a positioning or reference grid. After a brief session affixing the reflective targets and making minor adjustments to the indoor lightning to reduce reflections on the car, everything was good to go.

The complete scan work was finished in less than a third of the time it would have taken to scan using traditional methods. 

The complete scan work was finished overnight, shaving several hours off the time it would take to scan the car with a traditional arm-mounted scanner or laser line probe. Engineers estimated the scanning took less than 35% of time required to complete the same task if an articulated arm and laser line probe had been used. The handheld nature of the HandyScan allows much more freedom and simplicity. Post-processing of the captured data is also significantly faster, since the VxScan companion software directly outputs data in the STL file format. Therefore, all the time usually spent working on processing a point-cloud file is avoided.

The HandyScan 3D is portable, easy to use, reliable, and accurate. According to Creaform, the four main reasons users choose it are:

1) Since the scan is referenced using markers or positioning targets, it does not matter if an object is moved during the scan session, since all the targets will move together by the same amount. (On the other hand, an arm-mounted scanner is usually mounted on a heavy-duty tripod. The car or other object cannot move at all during scanning because the whole scan is referenced by the base of the arm, which must remain static.)