Making Hypercar Parts in your Garage starts with 3D Scanning

When it comes to 3D scanning, I can definitely tell you there is so much to learn and I don't feel like there's one resource where you learn all of the major basics to getting the whole benefit of 3D scanning all in one spot. That's what this video is. One of the greatest parts about this is we get to unbox Nin Stars Rigil and this unit is worth the unboxing. That's the middle part of the video. How? Why? Originally, it was excellent for reverse engineering, which to some people may sound like stealing your But that's one of the original uses for it where it is so much more useful for people like you and me that are in the car community and want to do something else. We'll talk about all these more in detail in a second. But it includes scanning people, scanning faces, that sort of thing to fit you into a car. It includes scanning things that you want to model in the car. And then you can also scan stuff and turn them into models. You can scan stuff, 3D print it. There are so many different things that you are now capable of doing thanks to 3D scanning. This is the story of my life. Having a bunch of small things that all by themselves are manageable, but then as soon as it all comes together, it's pure chaos. And this is the way I'm starting to get my life together is by organizing all of these small details. And that's exactly what AG1 does for my life. Joel can attest, I had a drawer filled with a bunch of different supplements, vitamins, everything. I looked like the dude from that meme of limes. It was just a crap ton of different bottles of tons of things. And that is where I can just do one thing. Comprehensive. It's the foundation for me. And especially when I'm traveling, the numbers don't lie. All of these things in there, the various minerals and vitamins are high quality ones. You look at the magnesium just for example and all of these other things that are also in there help you see how much gut health really is almost as important as brain health. AG1 has your back and your brain and your gut. Go to drinkaga1. com/rodomm or click on the QR code to get started and you will get a three travel pack of AG1 as well as AGZ different flavors as well as AG1 D3 K2 as well as the AG1 welcome kit with your first subscription order. I want to thank AG1 for sponsoring today's video. Let's talk about what else you can do. No, one of the things we've done is actually scan me, but the idea is to fit me into the car and you can make a stick figure and all that, but just trying to measure all this and trying to make a model of that, that's so much time where this within a matter of minutes, we have a three-dimensional scan of my body and we can make sure I fit inside of my car. Some of the other things are like making ducks. That was one of the coolest things we did for Pikes Peak is we designed ducks for air flow to make sure it goes in and out of the places and it was spoton. That includes scanning things to try and interface with something. Say you want to make a bracket for this brake caliper. You could measure the center of this hole and then measure the distance. Now, most calipers, not this caliper, but like measuring calipers are only 6 in wide. This distance is too far. Well, the scanner's accuracy is so great that you could scan the whole caliper and then within the scan, find the center of this hole, find the distance. You can have it within probably 30,000. There's a lot of really cool ways of measuring things. And one of the greatest places on a car is measuring and making like belts and pulleys or flanges or mounting brackets. That type of stuff is so hard to measure relative to each other. One of my the very favorite things that I did and I did it manually before was made a cover for the front diff on the four rotor. 20 bolts all in this weird pattern and I straight up took bolts and measured each one and triangulated it and did all that and it was off. With a 3D scanner, it's embarrassingly easy. One of the biggest things that trip people up about 3D scanning is what is it actually? And what I mean by that is when you 3D scan something, you take this and you scan something. You don't use that information for anything else other than that first step. It is a bunch of little dots in threedimensional space called a point cloud. So a point cloud is a cloud of points and they have an x, y, and z and they all are independent from each other. They just simply represent a ping. Imagine me being like this and going like, "Okay, that's a dot. That's a dot. " So there's just a bunch of those dots and you as a human can see the picture of all these dots and go, "Well, yeah, obviously that's a window. " Computer doesn't know that. It doesn't see the bigger picture. And that's where software then takes that point cloud and turns it into what's called a mesh, blanketing over all these points. And so what a computer loves to do, just like us rotary owners love, is triangles. And so what's going on is they're taking all the dots in that area and they're saying the average of all these dots in this area goes through these three spots and

that's what a mesh is. It just makes triangles that try to mathematically be the average of all the points in that area. Level one is point cloud and then all scanner software now outputs level two which is a mesh and then level three which is where the stuff really gets crazy is a model. You can stop at level two and use that mesh for whatever. But when you're trying to make something really cool, like for example, I wanted to scan this alternator from DC power to figure out where don't want it next to the spark plugs, all that sort of stuff. But point clouds are massive. Meshes are medium size. A model is very small. And so when you look at this, there's an overall circle here and then there's some extra four circles here and there's a circle here, circle here. All these circles all go to the same center point. They're all related to each other. You have these two circles and then these outer circles are actually bigger, but they're the center of the circle in the same spot. These are tangent. This is how you have to think about this. And so you start building this model and that's a lot less information and a lot cleaner than point cloud or mesh. You're simplifying it, which means losing information. But if you know this thing pretty well, also can make it more accurate. And now I can rapidly move with that instead of a point cloud where this could be like 100 megabytes. Once you've made the scan, you're always in file two meshes, file three, parametric models. They have both benefits and drawbacks. For example, when you scan this body, it's going to be a bunch of meshes. And then if you throw it into a software called Blender, which is good for modeling stuff, and you wanted to just make the hood look a little bit bigger, it's very quick to take the mesh and you just grab all the triangles in this area and pull them out. Like that's all you're doing is just saying, "Hey, take all these triangles, pull in this area, and then the hood has a huge hole in it. " It's simple, but you don't have to go all the way up to making a model to then undo it. Making a model is cleaner, but it's infinitely harder. What you'll see on Facebook all the time is you'll see somebody say, "Hey, I scan this and I want to just make this one change. " It's like, "No, no, no. Making changes on a mesh is very, very hard. Especially for a beginner, you almost have to learn even more, make the model to then make the changes that you want back to this. The biggest pitfall that happens with 3D scanning isn't the scanning, it's what you do with the scan. So, this is an absolutely badass laptop. So, I can run this without much of a problem. That silver thing right there, that's the rotary engine. And it's a mesh. And so as soon as you zoom in, like what you start seeing, you start seeing the reality. It's a bunch of triangles. That's a wire, a spark plug, and some weird artifact. And all that's not the real thing. That's not a model either. And thankfully, this laptop's really badass, but most laptops would have a hard time with a model that big. Right underneath the steering rack, look at that. That's actually the alternator. You can see I just made a simple model. That's the alternator in its most basic form, but everything's very accurate. So, I can make a mount for the alternator. This file is extremely small. We'll say this file is under like half a megabyte. Whereas the scan of the rotary engine, it's like 50 megabytes. It absolutely matters when it comes to doing crazy modeling. Now, we know what scanning is used for. How do you scan? Thankfully, that has gotten so much easier thanks to Shining 3D. What's an ideal type of unit to do the 3D scanning with? Well, there are very, very expensive units, but they are coming down in price and upgrading with features. This is Eincan's newest piece of equipment, the Riggel. This is a consumer level product, but it does way more than some of the older uh professional level products with way less cost. When you get down to it, it's really just a camera and it's got lasers. It's got infrared. It's got different light that it uses to see, but it's got to have multiple eyes threedimensionally locate things and knowing the distance between them. That's all done inside of this unit. When they're allin-one units like this, they're normally like 30 to $40,000 units. This one's 5,000. You can either use the onboard system or you can scan directly from your laptop or PC. So you get the heavyduty processing power of your machine already. Or you can do it without any of the wires and be in the moment with this unit. That's a pretty high resolution screen. Higher than I was expecting. So we're now connected to the Wi-Fi. And they have built-in tutorials right on the screen. Like this is a legitimate computer built into this. We've got tons of onboard space. Batteries come 61% charge. It's 20° C in here. And there are no markers. So, we got scan global markers. Man, this thing just gets right to it. I'm super cur Oh, wow. Look at that. That we haven't even done anything yet. Look at that. That's the infrared mode. And

we'll go into more detail about these different modes. Look at that. It doesn't lose its pos. Oh, that is incredible. They were saying that Look at that. It captures that position. There's no markers. This is markerless mode. We'll just stop there. That was just to fire up the unit. That's the point cloud. — Wow. It's really responsive. — I can clearly tell that that's a brake caliper and I can visually see that these don't work that way. It's not a human. It's a computer. And so it's bound by physical rules. One of the biggest challenges with these type of things is reflections. If you look in a mirror, what do you see? You see the thing it's reflecting. You don't see the mirror surface unless it's really dirty. And so that's one of the most common things that they do with scanners is you have to make that mirror dirty to be able to scan. You're never scanning mirrors. Actually, you are almost all the time, you're scanning surfaces that are mirror like most surfaces are reflective. And uh as a result, these typically in the past, and I'm talking only a couple years ago, absolutely nosedived in ability. You would have to get some sort of spray that would make it opaque, like a solid colored surface, and that spray is super expensive, or you're using foot powder, which also worked, but then stays on there. Now you have to clean it off. Just not a good way to go either way. Modern scanners still get tripped up, but they can definitely scan reflective things so much better than they used to. Without going into the depths of it, let me show you what scanning looks like. This is like the ideal scenario. So, you click scan. There's no wires on this thing. And you start seeing blue light across the lasers. And look at you can already see it. And I haven't even started scanning yet. So I click start scan. And then you just see this thing start coming to life. So we stop scanning. And this is what we end up with. And that's pretty damn accurate. That was 5 seconds of work and it saw quite a bit of information. That's the dream scenario. Say you were able to hold an apple right here in the middle of the air and start scanning it. It has no reference and then you realize that there's no up, there's no sideways, there's no left, there's no front and back. None of that exists to this thing. It's just trying to capture the information about that apple relative to itself. Older scanners and quite frankly scanning in general really benefit from those little dots that you see all over all the stuff in the shop. Those dots, they're just little circles of reflective material surrounded by very opaque black material. What that does is it takes this thing that's just floating in space and says, "Ooh, that's a spot and I know where that's at. Three or four spots, you can start to say, "Oh, I know what I'm looking at. " And I have three-dimensional space. And that's what the machine has to do. I just scan this. It doesn't even realize that those dots are on there. That's how good this scanner is. And without getting into the technical stuff, I'm just looking for features. Meaning that it's doing that same three-dimensional thing, but it's actually looking at like this. It's going those two holes are there. This is here. It doesn't know they're holes. It just knows that they're wild shapes. And it just says, "Oh, I'm coming from up here, and this is here, and these are there. " Does all the math based on this. That takes a lot of processing power because it's thinking. It's actively thinking the dots. It's like, "Hey, I see this dot, and this dot. I know where I'm at. It doesn't have to think as much. And watch how quickly when I switch this over to dots. How quickly you can move around this piece without any problem. So, I'm just going to press go. There's the object. Press scan. Look at how quick that's going. And it's it you see now it's showing those little red circles. It's those are the ones that it sees. And you can move around so quickly because it it's just once it sees those dots, it's good to go. Well, it's all aluminum, but it's partially reflective. And look at how much information I just got that quickly. So, you can see the benefit of the dots. Imagine you're driving a car. You're on the highway and you close your eyes for a second. Are you going to still be in the same lane? Maybe. Close your eyes for 10 seconds and you start to drift. No matter what, whatever straight line you think you're on, you're naturally going to drift without any sort of frame of reference. Same thing happens without the dots. is that if there's not dots all the way from here to here, a little bit of error here, it turns to the right, and in theory, if you were scanning a very massive thing and just kept scanning it like this and kept going, it'll start curving, it'll bend, it'll do weird things. And so, the dots really do help keep a triangulated squareness to all of it and makes it much quicker to scan. There's another mode that is even faster and has an even better purpose. doesn't need dots and it's what we use to scan me because we're not putting dots all over me. This mode on this can do a lot further range 1600 millimeters, but it's a lot rougher and when you realize what it's capable of

doing, you can use it to your advantage and it has some significant advantages over the other mode. But when you see this, it's going to look more unrefined. Point at this table because there's just a lot of over here. You can see some weird showing up. You don't see it. I don't see it. There's no laser lights being bounced off of things. It's just infrared. So, it's still light. And if you get like a night vision goggles, more than likely you can probably see the lights flashing off of this thing. The green is where it can currently see. And it looks more like noise and everything looks softer. It's hauling ass. Like you see that it's not it's I lost it there. But overall, that's how impressive this is. So, we'll go ahead and stop that mode. So, you can tell it's actually pretty accurate, but it's not nearly as crisp. Things that you don't scan much of have a texture that isn't necessarily there. But the closer you are to something and the more consistent you scan it from different angles, this mode is smart and starts cleaning it up. What is this used for? You can use it for humans and objects and portraits like that, but it can scan a lot of space compared to the laser mode. the bigger the scanning area you want to get for relative to that scanner, the lower resolution quality it is. And as you start to tighten that up in the same scanner, you get more accurate, fine, precise detail. So, this is the biggest mode, and this is great for scanning cars type of thing. Now, this scanner isn't the one that you'd want to do to scan this whole car once, but watch how well it works. I'll show you. This is real time. Thankfully, I have these handful of dots on there already. And you'll hear me losing uh synret with that. And that's what that clicking is. But look at how much of the car I can scan that quickly. The issue with scanning without dots is that if you were to scan a tube and you're just looking at a section of tube, what section of the tube are you on? You don't know. It's just all the same geometry. And so when you hear this thing beeping, that's one of the biggest first problems you have with scanning is that it just can't tell. And when you think about it like a scanner, you're like, "Oh, that does actually make sense. I know I wanted to do it, but once I got to this area, I started getting upset because it was like too vague. So, one of the tricks to 3D scanning I've realized is you take like weird objects with simple textures and you place them next to the thing that you're trying to scan and it will like I had left a rag next to the car and it picked up the rag as texture and man you could spin around that rag and the machine would keep its positioning. But you can see that with enough effort, you can scan a whole vehicle. You got to do it slow, otherwise stuff gets weird. Now, we'll go back to the laser modes and show you why that might not be the ideal mode for this. Here goes the laser mode. And I'm using those dots. Look at how much more definition that little Nacka duct has. But you can also see one of the challenges. Look at the dole showing up. That's not a hole in the chassis. It's a color that doesn't work well with blue light. Inherently the problem has to be okay well I ran out of dots or the color or the reflectiveness. But the data I'm getting is so accurate except for the data it can't scan. This is where you would start spraying with dust almost every scanner if you're going to do a whole car. But you can see how quickly you can prototype if you don't need the most accuracy and you just need to get it done. Infrared really has its place. So, here's one more mode where it's the same but different. This is going to be the laser mode again, but you can see it's five or six straight lines in a row. And so, I'm going to go ahead and turn the brightness all the way up on this thing. And watch how specific this mode is. It's going to beep a lot more because these dots have to be even tighter. This is for high detail. So, exactly what I'm doing here where I wanted to scan the head and I really wanted to get that data. You have to plan accordingly because look at this premium accuracy. The big super expensive scanners typically can scan more with the same resolution that a smaller scanner could scan the smaller thing. But on a single unit, this unit generally speaking, the wider and the more it's grabbing the rougher the scan is going to be. And that the more you want detail, the more narrow its field of view is. And the problem with field of view with this, it can only see some of the dots or some of the texture. So you have to increase the texture. Something bigger with smooth surfaces. The more and more detail you

want off of that, the harder it is it for to figure out where it is in threedimensional space. That's the trade-off. You'll notice that I currently have the cable plugged in. All those previous demonstrations were through wireless alone. this wireless 6 to this Wi-Fi 6 perfectly fine. But when you wire it, even this unit can be even faster. So, we're going to go ahead and do the same thing and rescan this. Look at I just turned one move and it's already that much information. Okay, that was like what 15 seconds of work. And cool, I've scanned something. What's so good about that? Well, depends on what you're trying to do. But first of all, this is the result of those 15 seconds of scanning. My favorite thing about this software is when you get closer, you can actually see is essentially making the point cloud. Those are just a bunch of dots. That's the optical illusion. Looks solid from here. Point cloud from all the way up here. There's no backside to this. If that doesn't matter to you, mission's accomplished. Say you wanted to measure the center of these two holes and make a bracket from there. Your entire scan is done. But if you wanted to make a model of it or use this in a model somewhere, you're gonna make multiple scans because guess what? You can't scan the bottom side. This software is great. You scan this basically do a next, flip it over, scan it again, and then you align them to each other by saying this dot that was in both scans is the same dot. And that makes it beautifully easy. Their software is incredible. You can actually just let it automatically do that. I'd say nine out of 10 times it is spot-on. We don't need all this other information. That was just stuff nearby. We'll say, "Hey, listen. We want everything connected to this thing. " Click connected. And then we'll say, "Not that. Delete all that other shit. " We'll grab this. Delete that as well. We're still cleaning up the point cloud by saying, "Forget all these other points. " And that's exactly what I've done. Click next. We're still in point cloud mode. But at this point, this is when we would go from point cloud to mesh. All these options, we'll just leave them as they are. We'll click preview. At first, that looks almost identical until you start zooming in. You can actually see the triangle pattern. They're evenly sized triangles. All you're doing is making all these triangles. And we're just going to leave it at this default mode. From here, you have a lot of options on how to clean up the mesh. We can go back. The software lets us go back to this, but at this point, we've now created a mesh. We have a thing, and we need to nurse it. We need to take care of love it. Every single triangle on a mesh like this is the exact same size for the most part. A flat surface could be one big triangle and a couple smaller triangles to get the corners of the flat surface. You do that in this software. We will switch the view over to wireframe. Those are the points and the outside edges of every triangle on there. And you can see point triangle point triangle. They're all the exact same size. That's a waste of storage. This is going to be a very massive file. I want all the flat areas to have less triangles. We're going to optimize it. So I'm going to turn this to 100% and we'll preview that. And watch how the triangle shapes change. You're going to notice that. See how that looks more blue? Those edges have more triangle data in them. And once we simplify this, I'll just do extreme simplification. preview that there are some big triangles like I said massive like that's a huge triangle right there and then as it gets closer to edges small triangles again so this is the mesh that you'll now start to see like the secret of like how computers work they will never let it be full size there's always tricks to it in this case the trick is make flat areas bigger triangles means less storage quicker for the computer to process this file went from 14 megabytes to 2 17th of the size. And it's up to me whether or not that that's too much detail taken away. Let's go extreme. Now circles are no longer circles at all. They're very obviously triangle shaped. It's 17th the size and the overall shape really didn't change at all. And that's up to you how much detail you do or do not want. Obviously, the dream is every single thing has as much detail as possible. That's just foolish and that's not how anybody does it. Once we have this mesh, however we like it, one of the biggest problems with meshes is that in threedimensional space there, it's not lined up to anything. One of the biggest things you have to be ready for is how to align it. And that's where flat surfaces come in really big. So, we're going to go ahead take this mesh. And yet again, inside of all their software, there's an align. And what's funny is in this alignment, you can actually manually align it. But right now, it thinks that that's aligning it. You can kind of spin it, try and get it to be straight up. But

even cooler is you can actually make what are called planes, which is this table is a plane. And that plane, you know, there's X, Y, and Z. You'll get really good at knowing which way is X and Y and which way is Z. Z is the easy one. Positive Z is this table pointing up this way. So Z rising. Z negative is the bottom of the table. So we want to make sure that Z positive is this way and Z negative is that way. Because I didn't scan any of the bottom. That makes that actually really hard to do. So then you realize not everything's in the computer. You have to make sure that you scan and keep enough data in the scan to use it relative to other things. But what is easy, see that flat surface on this face? This side being flat, that's a flat. And so that is one of the three directions. And that happens to be X. If you're looking at it from the front, go in here and you create a feature. And we're going to create a plane. And we we're just picking three points. So it's still triangles. It was never not triangles. So, we're just going to pick three spots on this thing that are far enough apart from each other that keep it. One point, two points, and I believe this down here is also part of the same thing. Yeah. So, that is a plane and we've created that in this software. We can go to align and we can just say, hey, there's that plane we created. We'll just pick X. We realized that we have to do more than just one plane to align this thing. That's it. You're just aligning it. And then now it's really easy to bring it into Blender, bring it into Fusion, 3D print it so it's not upside down. Like all those different things are very easy to do once you're done with the original software. This video has been very important to me because I want to show you that 3D scanning really has made a place for itself. You can go way deep into the CAD. You can go deep into 3D modeling like Blender and all those sort of things, but the surface level means that you can just jump in and start doing stuff and then go down each of those different rabbit holes. But at the end of the day, it means that if you have an itch to build something custom, you now have a lot of tools at your disposal to build whatever you