3D Scanning with Metascan - Lidar and Photogrammetry on iPhone 13

hi everyone how's it going today i'm going to be reviewing the metascan lidar and photogrammetry app available for iphone and ipad you might have noticed from my previous videos that i've been experimenting with some of the lighter and photogrammetry apps available on iphone at the moment i recently picked up an iphone 13 pro and i have been very impressed by the lidar skating feature i've been using scannerverse app for lidar scanning and polycam for photo mode and i have to say i was blown away by metascan when i started using it recently it seems to have the best bits of both scannerverse and polycam but i found it superior in most aspects similarly to polycam metascan includes both lidar scanning features as well as photogrammetry mode using apple's new object capture api while most of the lidar scanning apps have been good especially for large objects and spaces i was very impressed by the lidar scanning models produced by metascan the lidar produces the cleanest scans i have seen of any lidar app what i mean by cleaner scans is the continuity of the textures in the models and the general reduction of artifacts in the meshes themselves compared with other apps while the lidar models are useful for large objects all the apps i have tried struggle with smaller objects this is a limitation of the lidar sensor on the iphone itself and hopefully this technology will continue to improve with future iphone models and with improvements in software one feature i really like about the lidar scanner in meta scan is the minimap display which shows you a bird's eye view of what you have already scanned around you this can help you work out where you have already scanned and avoid rescanning while metascan has an excellent lighthouse scanning mode where it really excels is photo mode the photogrammetry models are simply superb and are exceptionally detailed unlike other apps i've used which use the apple object capture api when taking photos in photo mode it's quick and responsive with very little delay other apps that i've tried with the apple object capture software have generally had a small lag when taking photos which can really slow down the capture and i've generally found it just annoying i was astounded by how good the photogrammetry models were from metascan i've used a lot of desktop-based photogrammetry softwares over the years including mesh room agisoft and reality capture and metascan is by far the best i have ever used the meshes are of exceptional quality and it exports roughness ambient occlusion and normal maps when you export in obj format uploads to the reconstruction server are very quick and the quickest of any app i have seen so far and processing generally takes only five to ten minutes on the cloud and then it's available on your iphone [Music] the ar mode is a really nice feature where you can place objects you've already scanned back in the room at the correct scale i can see this might be useful if you were buying a piece of furniture for example and wanted to see how it looks in your house before you buy it the cropping tool is very similar to that of scaniverse and generally the easiest to use of any app you also have the option to add a grid and change between perspective and orthographic projection in the viewer like most of the similar apps you can measure distances on your mesh as well for those of you who need precise distance calibration i did a quick test of the photogrametry scaling accuracy on this tissue box which has dimensions of 21.8 by 11.5 by 9.5 centimeters and meta scan produce dimensions of 22 by 11 by 9 centimeters which matches to within the precision displayed by the app the video export mode has a lot of flexibility and can export recordings at full hd at 60 frames a second which is what i use to make these renders as you would expect you can export your textured meshes in most of the common formats including usdz fbx obj gltf ply lazy and you can even export the raw images if you like here is one of the models i exported in obj format to blender you can see it has the normal and roughness maps applied as well as the base color texture i'd previously done this with another app and the textures didn't come through properly and i had to manually find and attach the correct texture maps but with metascan it worked perfect the first time the monthly subscription is similarly priced to other photogrammetry apps which use the apple object capture mode the price is very reasonable for the services they provide you get 150 photogrammetry scans a month and with the lidar feature you can scan as many objects as you like there are no restrictions the convenience alone is well worth the price not to mention the relative quality of the models that it can produce when using desktop-based photogrammetry softwares like meshroom for example it can be quite tedious to take your photos copy them onto your pc and then you can wait up to an hour or more to reconstruct the model providing you have a decent gpu and then you need to do a lot of post processing to clean up the meshes all these examples i have shown here have had nothing done to them except cropping and that almost isn't required the app is really good at just keeping the object you're interested in having tried a lot of different lidar scanning and apple object capture apps for the iphone 13 i can definitely say this is my favorite and produces the most impressive results i'd probably go as far as saying this is my new favorite app for the iphone i'd encourage you to try it for your art architectural engineering and science projects thanks for watching this review be sure to like this video and subscribe until next time take care

Channel: Micro Singularity

Views: 1,354

Keywords: iPhone, iPhone 13 pro, lidar, 3d scanning, blender, blender tutorial, photogrammetry, 3D print, metascan, scaniverse, polycam, apple, metaverse, Meta

Id: 9CWd7dGVVB4

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021