Toucan Workflow: Performing the Scan

Starting a New Scan

  1. Power on Toucan and wait a while
  2. On the home screen, tap New Scan
  3. Select laser power level (3R is far superior)
  4. Select the Settings icon
  5. Set SLAM mode to Geometry
  6. Select whether the object is “dark” or “light”
  7. Apply
  8. Select laser power level (again)1
  9. Turn on floor removal2
  10. Leave the preview video on

Scanning

  1. Point the Toucan at the object to be scanned such that the bottom edge of the object is in view with the stage below.

    Ideally, you’ll see “floor” (the scanning stage) glow a deep red (through the safety goggles, light pink without) and the object will be green. Or the floor/stage just won’t populate with blue cloud dots. This indicates that the floor deletion mode is working. If you can’t get it to do this, then turn off floor deletion and deal with it in post (not hard, just consumes scan buffer more rapidly).3

  2. Press the blue “play” button4

    Toucan Scanner in Action
    Toucan Scanner in Action

    If everything is working correctly, the areas that are currently visible to the structured light will be bright green. The captured areas will be a fainter blue. In the above image, I started scanning a random box full of stuff on my desk. The bright green is what the Toucan is currently scanning. The blue behind it was previously scanned. Note that there is no “floor”; floor deletion mode is working.

    Also, the vertical graph in the middle is the distance to subject. Everything that is actively being scanned is 150mm to 250mm away from the Toucan.

  3. Move slowly around the object, panning the Toucan up and down until the entire target object is covered in the blue cloud of points
  4. Make sure to scan from multiple angles and capture the top, too

  5. Keep scanning beyond the full 360°. You want maybe a good 90° of overlap at the beginning/end of the scan

    If you see significant ghosting while scanning — like the blue points of your object are offset from the green highlights of what the scanner is currently scanning — that indicates that the tracking failed somewhere along the way. Best just to pause and start over, though you can sometimes keep scanning and “repair” the tracking on the fly.

  6. When done, hit the pause button and then the checkmark.

    The Toucan is going to toss up a progress bar that typically climbs pretty quickly to about 50% and then may take a few minutes to move past 60%. During this time, it is doing a de-noise pass on the raw data. Unfortunately, the resulting data is useless if we want to do an alignment step.5

  7. Once it is done processing, there will be another dialog where you can edit a distance. Ignore it. In fact, check “don’t show again” and click “OK”.

    The Toucan post processes each capture automatically, presenting a de-noised version of the point cloud.
    Toucan Point Cloud

    The Toucan thinks for a brief moment then shows your freshly captured scan as a point cloud image. It is noisy. It is only vaguely recognizable. That’s OK! As long as there isn’t a double image or obvious geometry defects, you’ve done a successful capture!

  8. Click “Done” in the upper right to go back to the home screen after confirming that the scan should be saved.6

Errors While Scanning

There are a handful of error messages that come up during scanning.

⚠️ TOO CLOSE / TOO FAR

Toucan is too close or too far from the object. Move away / towards accordingly.

⚠️ TRACKING FAILED

Toucan has lost track of the structure of the environment being scanned and doesn’t know where to place new cloud points in relation to the existing ones. Back up a bit and re-scan an adjacent area that was not problematic. Then slowly scan back into the area where it lost tracking. Vary the scan, though. A little further away. Come from a different angle. That sort of thing.

⚠️ Persistently Losing Tracking

If you can’t keep tracking locked on the target, it may be for several reasons.

Try turning the brightness up or down. For the anvil, I had to scan at full brightness. Anything less and the Toucan could not maintain tracking.

Try switching from near to far mode. If the scanner is further away from the object, that may keep enough complex details in frame to persist tracking.

Some objects cannot be scanned without additional preparation using either scanning markers or some sort of scanning spray.

Multiple Passes (for full coverage)

If you need to accurately capture the underside of the object, then you’ll need to do a second (or more) scanning pass. The anvil required two passes. One right-side up and one entirely upside down.

The second scan is the same as the first. Flip the object over so that all the parts you need to scan are visible and repeat the scanning process.

Make sure you have good overlapping coverage between the two scans as that will make alignment easier.

You could do all of the scan cleanup, processing and mesh generation on device. I personally find using a computer to do this quite a bit easier.

← Setting the Stage Table of Contents Transferring Scans →

  1. You’ll be doing this a lot. It won’t stick. I get why, but it is annoying. ↩

  2. When turned on, the icon has a \ through it. Momentarily confusing until I realized that the icon is a floor. ↩

  3. The colors chosen should be more distinct when viewed through the safety glasses. ↩

  4. Why isn’t this the standard red circle with a square dot in the middle record button used on every other device? ↩

  5. There should be an option to turn this processing off. I really want the Toucan to produce raw point clouds so I can import them into the computer for alignment. Even if I’m doing alignment on the Toucan, the de-noised point clouds are a waste of time/battery because they can’t be used for alignment. ↩

  6. Why does the “Done” button look disabled? Why doesn’t it look like a button? ↩