Spent the weekend scanning stuff around the house and here's how it went

Mine clicked into place around the six month mark too. I picked up a used Revopoint POP 2 off a local listing and spent the first few weeks scanning junk around the house just to learn the software. The thing that finally made it useful was a cracked corner bracket on my son's bed frame. No way I was going to measure those odd angles by hand, but the scan gave me enough to rebuild it in Fusion and print four fresh ones. Held up for over a year now.

On the cleanup grind, I found the biggest time saver for me was just accepting a rougher mesh than I thought I needed. Early on I was spending an hour chasing every little bump on parts that were going to sit inside a wooden frame where nobody would ever see them. Once I started asking myself whether that surface actually had to mate with anything, my repair time dropped to a fraction of what it was.

One trick that helped with the holes: overlapping scans help, but slowing down the sweep matters more than adding more angles, at least on my unit. Fast passes were where I got gaps along edges. Also, dark or shiny plastic is still a nightmare even with spray. I keep a cheap bottle of dry shampoo around for that, same idea as the matte spray but easier to wipe off afterward and it doesn't leave a film on anything I'm planning to return to service.

I went a different direction with this a couple years back and never bought a dedicated scanner. I use photogrammetry instead, just my old phone camera and some free software. Around the house it handles most of what I need. I did a scan of a chipped corner trim piece on a window sill last fall, took about sixty photos walking around it, and the resulting mesh was good enough to print a patch that blended in after a light sand and some filler paint.

The tradeoff is exactly what the cleanup complaints here describe, but worse in some ways. Photogrammetry hates anything reflective or uniform, and my first few attempts on a glossy ceramic drawer pull came out as useless blobs. Also there's no live feedback like a handheld gives you. You find out your scan is garbage after you've processed everything, which can mean reshooting the whole thing. Where it wins for me is cost and scale. Small parts like knobs and brackets work fine, but I've also captured a whole porch railing section that no consumer scanner in my budget could handle. The capture takes longer, maybe ten or fifteen minutes of shooting, but I skip the hardware purchase entirely. If someone is on the fence, I'd say try the phone route first for a weekend. If the workflow clicks and you still want faster scans with fewer holes, then the dedicated unit makes sense.

This is the push I needed to stop putting it off. I keep breaking things around the house where the broken piece itself is gone, like a little clip or a corner off a plastic bin lid, and I figured that whould be impossible to copy since there's nothing left to trace. Can a scanner even handle that, or do you need at least part of the original to work from? I'd assume it's hopeless with nothing to start from but maybe the spot it snapped off from holds enough of a shape.