USER MANUAL

• Make sure the scanner is well-calibrated. Ideally, perform the calibration right before scanning. Refer to Chapter 6: Calibration for more details on the calibration process.

• Do not scan in conditions of high illumination. Avoid direct sunlight and bright artificial light. If possible, scan indoors and dim the lights.

• Keep optimal scanning distance between the object and the scanner. If the object is mostly green on the scanner screen — you're doing great. The areas that are too close to the scanner are shown in red. The areas that are too far from the scanner are shown in blue and purple.

• The optimal focal distance (green zone) for Calibry is 75cm (31"), but it is possible to scan in the range from 55cm (23", red zone) to 95cm (39", purple zone).

• The optimal focal distance (green zone) for Calibry Mini is 24cm (10"), but it is possible to scan in the range from 18cm (7.5", red zone) to 32cm (13", purple zone).

• Try to keep the most important areas in the center of the frame as you're scanning.

• While scanning, constantly and smoothly rotate, tilt and move the scanner to change the light grid position on the object. This will help get more diverse data, capture more details and achieve even density of the point cloud.

• If the surface is difficult to scan, try to scan the area at a 80-90° angle to this surface.

First and foremost, you have to choose which tracking mode you are going to use. Scanners capture hundreds and even thousands of separate frames during each scan. These frames then should be stacked together in a consistent way to create a point cloud. Tracking refers to the way it is done and to the information used to achieve that. It is literally how a scanner keeps track of what it looks at and how it moves in respect to the object. Depending on the type of object, its shape, material, size, color and other properties, you may want to use different types of tracking. Calibry scanners support all three of these: geometry tracking, marker tracking and texture tracking. You can toggle between them by tapping the tracking selection button at the bottom right corner of the touchscreen. Let's take a closer look at each one of these tracking modes.

Makers are just white circles with thick black rim around them for better contrast. They are supplied with the scanner. Calibry comes with a pack of magnetic markers for metal surfaces and a sheet of sticker markers for any other surface. Calibry Mini comes with a pack of cut-out markers that can be placed around the object and a sheet of sticker markers that can be applied to the object itself. Neither Calibry nor Calibry Mini require retroreflective coating of the markers, therefore you can easily print more if needed. Markers can be printed out on ordinary or sticky paper using an office printer. The only limitation here is that the paper should not be glossy. If you're going to require more magnetic markers — please contact your Calibry reseller or reach out for Thor3D support.

When Texture tracking mode is selected, a scanner switches to the texture camera and shows the object in color. Preview mode gives you an idea of how good the brightness of the image is. It should be clearly visible, but not overexposed. Use Texture Brightness slider to pick optimal value (explained below).

When scanning in texture tracking mode with Live3D, a textured image with distance overlay is displayed on the scanner screen. Try keeping the object mostly in the green zone to achieve the best results.

There are four types of settings that can be changed using sliders:

• Texture Brightness (0 by default)

• Frequency of Texture Frames (20 by default)

• Frames on Screen (18 by default)

• Frames per Second Limit (35 by default)

These four sliders can be accessed in one of these three ways:

Option 3: Dedicated Preview Mode buttons with circular indicators

The Default button resets all four sliders to their default settings.

Following sections are describing these settings in more detail.

When scanning without Live3D, scanner just shows several last frames on the screen. By default, the last 18 frames are shown, but this value can be changed from 2 to 32 using Frames on Screen slider. This value does not affect the scanning and data acquisition, but rather changes the way scanned data is shown on the scanner screen.

Frequency of Texture Frames is a slider that sets how often texture frames will be captured and saved. These texture frames can then be used for texturizing the model. This value sets the amount of geometry frames taken between every texture frame. So the bigger this value is, the smaller the amount of texture frames a scan will contain. For example, if the value is 20 and a scan contains 1000 frames, it means that every 20th frame will contain color-data and there will be 50 texture frames in total. If the value is 10 than the same 1000-frame scan will contain twice as many texture frames (100) because they will be captured and saved twice as often (every 10th frame). 

The default value is 20, but you can pick any value from zero to 40 frames. However, in most cases there is no need to change this value.

The most common reason to change it, is setting it to zero when texture is not needed (when you're not planning to texturize the result).

It is important to note that this value is neither affected by nor affecting the type of tracking used. Any type of tracking can be used with any value of this slider. In Marker and Texture Tracking Modes a scanner is going to make a texture frame for every geometry frame anyway, but these frames are used only for tracking purposes and are discarded shortly after if they are not needed. So, if, for example, the value is 20 and Marker or Texture Tracking Modes are used, the scanner will make a texture frame for every geometry frame, but 19 out of every 20 texture frames will be discarded after tracking data has been extracted from them, and only one frame out of 20 will be saved for further texturing. In Geometry Tracking Mode, a scanner does not use texture camera for tracking purposes, so it just makes a texture frame for each 20th geometry frame.

Access to this setting is shown above, in "Slider Settings" section.

If you are planning to texturize a model or when Texture Tracking Mode is used, it is important that a scanner can clearly detect the color pattern on a scanned surface. If texture frames are too dark or, on the contrary, overexposed it could lead to bad texturing quality and texture tracking failures. To address that, it is possible to adjust texture brightness to current lighting conditions before scanning. To do that, tap Texture Brightness button in the Preview Mode to open the corresponding slider. The scanner will switch to texture camera view and you'll see what the scanner is seeing. If the object looks too dark on the screen, it means that Texture Brightness should be increased. If you see big areas painted in red, it means you have to decrease texture brightness. Ideally, you should see an evenly lit surface: not too dark, not too overexposed.

Red areas on the surface may also indicate the presence of glares. It may happen, for example, if the surface is too shiny. Changing the angle of scanning might also help to reduce glares. If not — decrease the texture brightness level until red areas disappear.

The amount of frames the scanner captures each second is called FPS (Frames per Second). This value depends on the performance of the PC/laptop the scanner is connected to. In most cases, the bigger this value — the better. But in some cases it may be useful to reduce it. Frames per Second Limit slider allows to reduce the scanning speed if needed.

Access to this setting is shown above, in "Slider Settings" section.

The main idea behind 3D scanning is that a certain type of light grid is projected on the object and then get captured by the camera. Distortions of that grid form a 3D frame. But for this system to work reliably, the grid should be clearly visible on the object. That is why it might be difficult to scan darker things (light grid is getting absorbed by the object) and to scan in high-illumination conditions (bright ambient light makes it more difficult for the camera to detect the grid on the object). At the same time, if the grid is too bright and thick, it may cause additional noise to appear on the 3D frame, thus decreasing the quality of the result.

To alleviate this problem, Calibry scanners allow users to change the projector power thus changing the brightness of the grid projected on the object. There are three available modes which a user can pick depending on the scanning conditions: