THREE 3D Scanning a Rubik's Cube

3D Scanning a Rubik's Cube with THREE

Scanning a Rubik’s Cube can be surprisingly tricky for many 3D scanners (spoiler alert: it’s not a problem for THREE).

 

Other Scanner Problems

Here are some common challenges.

  • Blue light scanners will only see the white and blue sides. The red, orange, yellow and green sides might as well be invisible!
  • For most 3D scanners (again, not THREE), capturing the black edging is completely out of the question.
  • The cube shape often results in handheld scanners losing tracking.

The first two of these problems - missing colors and black - would be solved for most scanners by using a scan spray, but the trade off is color/texture capture is lost. For the tracking, perhaps adding some markers on or around the cube would help. Perhaps.

 

Not a Problem for THREE

If you’ve been reading our blogs you won’t be surprised to learn that none of these are challenges for THREE!

 

Step-by-Step - Scanning the Rubik’s Cube with THREE

Here are the steps we followed to 3D scan the Rubik’s cube with THREE:

  1. Turntable scan with THREE, with the yellow face up, with color/texture capture, to capture the faces. Note, this scan will get the different coloured squares, but doesn’t get the black edging.
  2. Increase THREE’s camera exposure to capture the black edging. This scan won’t capture the color faces, just the edging.
  3. Turn the cube around so that it’s sitting on the scan turntable on the yellow side. Expose the camera darker to scan the faces.
The multicoloured faces. Note, the visible colors are not the colors of the cube. The texture/color is not shown in this screenshot. You will note the Texture Opacity slider control at the bottom is set to 0, which means the texture is not being shown at all, just the geometry.
  1. Expose the camera to get the edges.

The black edges between the faces!

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  1. Now, we have the faces all around the cube, and the edges all around the cube. These need to be matched up using the Point Pick feature.

Using Point Pick Alignment in THREE

 

Point Pick Alignment complete. Here is the result, before meshing and texturing.
6. Mesh, texture, export, done. This is what you can expect from THREE!

  

Rubik's Cube by Matter and Form on Sketchfab

 

The coolest thing is that, despite the multiple scan alignments, the different colors, and the black edging, THREE made a scan that is beautifully accurate. Measured in Meshlab, the cube is 57.0168 mm wide, which is 16.8 microns deviation from the object’s 57 mm, well within THREE’s stated accuracy of 50 microns!

There’s nothing else like THREE!

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