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At the hobbyist level currently the best results (in terms of cost/quality and time/quality and overall capability) can be achieved using photogrammetry in conjunction with processing in Meshroom and post processing in Meshlab or Blender or editor of your own selection. This works for really tiny stuff right up through drones scanning entire buildings, and the workflow is the same. That's not to say there isn't a knack to it or things you have to learn. But it's the right direction to explore right now.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye-C-OOFsX8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D0EhSi-vvc for a quick intro.

There are alternative workflows and "low cost" commercial hardware and software products even for photogrammetry in the market. Nearly every technique I have tried or seen produces a much lower quality result than the above, costs a lot more, or has some other limitation (such as the size of the object you can scan) that radically limit its usefulness.

This is of course until you get to the high end scanners like the one linked here which use one or more high resolution LIDAR sensors in conjunction with cameras, lights, motion sensors, etc: alll selected and calibrated to give precision results. If you can stomach the price they are awesome.

But to some degree, commercial solutions regardless of cost will often promise their output will require "no editing or post processing" You should be aware that this is total baloney. You will absolutely have to devote a little time and effort into learning how to edit, clean, and simplify meshes regardless of what you intend to do with them.

All this being said, this advice only really applies to objects where 3d scanning has some merit. If you want to 3d print something like a replacement part for a broken appliance, often 3d scanning even with an expensive commercial scanner is not the best approach. Many times it's considerably faster to pull out a pair of calipers and simply model the object in some CAD software like Fusion360 or for real simple stuff, even TinkerCAD.




Meshroom is really good, and it's even better for large scale stuff (like landscape / architecture reconstruction from aerial pics).




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