
My experience with the 3DMakerPro Fox
I purchased the scanner with the hope of using it to scan some cubby areas of my vehicles as one of my hobbies is 3D design of automotive storage solutions. My initial impressions of it were not very good. I tried to scan my Volvo EX90 door storage area, the Qi charger hole and the under-console area, but none of the scans were successful! The door storage area presents a focal length issue. The software is SUPER sensitive about the required distance from the object, and I just don't think there's a way to get a good angle on it. The Qi charger hole wasn't recognized at all, I think this is because of the black surface and the fact that I didn't know you can tweak the brightness of the camera (maybe I should've read the manual). The under-storage area kept throwing "out of sight" tracking errors when I tried scanning it. I was about ready to return the device and give up...
Then I did some research. Bare with me, I am brand new to the 3D scanning game so this is probably old news to most of you. Smooth surfaces don't scan well. Apparently you can use dry shampoo spray to help give a surface some texture, I haven't tried that yet. There are some reflect 3D marker stickers you can attach to the surface you want to scan that help the scanner keep track of where it is. Those helped A LOT. I tweaked the brightness until the scanner could see the black surface. Here's the scan I did of my Toyota Tundra charger area.
Not perfect but enough to where I could use it as a baseline for creating a MagSafe charger model.
...and it fit almost PERFECTLY first time. I didn't have to scale the model at all, it was very accurate. I've never wasted so little plastic trying to get the fit right! I probably only spent maybe 2 hours of 3D design time on it. Having some other MagSafe models to pull from helped, of course, but getting the fit right would have typically taken 4-to-5 tries depending on the complexity of the surface.
I'm still not all that happy with the 3d scanner software interface but if you are patient, you can get it to work. I think I had to scan maybe half a dozen times until I got a result I was happy with, something I thought I could design around.