The Artec Space Spider II is the newest 3D scanner in Artec's lineup. The new Space Spider II improves on the original design with a faster frame rate, larger field of view and higher resolution. What that translates to is taking 3D scans faster of larger objects with better details. Let's take a look at how it works. Here I've got a small cast part and I'm going to be using just a simple lazy Susan turntable. This is not required but it makes my job easier because I can spin the part in front of me instead of having to walk in a circle around it. I'm using Artex Studio software to run the Space Spider 2 and the first thing I'm going to do is just select the preview mode so I can see what the scanner sees on the computer monitor. I'm seeing a couple things on the screen right now. I'm seeing a preview of what the scanner sees in real time as I move around. I'm seeing a grid that's popping up trying to snap on to the largest flat surface that it sees. That's going to allow the software to automatically delete away the turntable at the end of the scan. Finally I'm seeing a histogram on the left side of the screen giving me distances from the face of the scanner. I want to keep the distance right in the middle of that spectrum. When I'm ready to start and I feel like I've got a good plan of attack, I'm going to use the button on the scanner to begin recording. And again the big field of view on the scanner means for a part of this size I don't have to move around too much. It's capturing the entire part inside. That scan looks great so far and we'll just take a look at what we captured. Frame by frame I can scroll through these and see how they match up to each other. Now what's interesting about the way that Artex technology works is there is nothing inherently built into this scanner that tracks its movement. It's matching up these frames using a process called registration where details of either the part or the turntable are matched to each other by best fit. This means that the real world shapes and colors, any kind of marking, imperfection or even the ridges on the turntable are the details that are needed to match them up. We don't require any kind of fiducial markers, targets, stickers that we need to add on to the things that we scan when we scan them. I'm going to take a second scan to get all the surfaces I didn't get the first time. Just flipping the part over and the second scan is going to be the exact same process as the first. Again that fast frame rate on the new Space Spider 2 means we can move very very quickly and trust that we're capturing everything that we need to. Alright so I've got my two scans here. Here's scan one and scan two and as soon as I exit the scan window the software is automatically going to conduct the base removal process to delete away that turntable. And if that hadn't worked correctly or if I didn't have that setting turned on we've got manual eraser tools that can do so very nicely. I'm just going to progress on to the align tool where I can move these around to match up to each other simply by picking a couple of overlapping surfaces spots that we got in both scans to pull the two objects together. I don't have to be terribly perfect because the software corrects any imperfection in my alignment. We'll take a quick look at this data in X-ray mode to get a good sense of what this all looks like. Here the pink is my first scan, the yellow is the second, and I said before that the scanner is matching the frames up to each other by best fit. During the scan it's only doing so to a fairly rough degree of accuracy. Now that I'm finished and I've accumulated multiple scans I'm going to run global registration which is going to go back through that same sort of a process of matching the frames up to each other but to a much higher degree of accuracy. Now that that's done I can run my fusion process. The smart fusion is going to take all of this point cloud data and convert it into a mesh data set. It's going to be a 3D object made up entirely of very very small triangular surfaces. There it is and it looks pretty good so far. Let's take a look at what we got. Lots of great details. I'm seeing lots of the imperfections of the welds in this part. Also great detail on the engraved text. I'll run a mesh simplification to shrink the overall size of this file and let's take a quick look at the small triangular surfaces that this is made up of. Finally if I care to I can apply the full color photographic data to the surface of this mesh so that we can get a fully photorealistic full color 3D scan. Now a lot of people are only going to be using the software to get the raw geometry for engineering purposes. Others will be very interested in the full color data set to use for marketing images, instruction manuals, or any number of other applications. If you'd like to learn more about any of our 3D scanning products please contact us at TriMech Solutions.