With the Kinect 2 coming out, that means I can finally afford some sort of 3D scanner.
Yup, the original Kinect is now cheap enough that I can get one. The Kinect isn’t the best scanner out there, the original Kinect even less so. But it’s cheap. If you’re thinking of getting a Kinect for XBox 360 you’ll need an adapter to power it. But once you do that just load up the same drivers for the Kinect for Windows.
I loaded up Skanect since they have a free trial version and I held up the Kinect and had my son sit like a statue as I walked around him.
Unfortunately the cord didn’t reach far enough, so I didn’t manage to get his back. Still, now I have a vaguely Gabe-shaped blob from the front.
Then I got a rotating chair at a second hand store, and tried to rotate myself around while the Kinect was propped stationary and pointed at me.
Not great, but enough that I could maybe model something around my own face using the scan as reference, which is the immediate goal. But it’s hard to rotate myself without wiggling so maybe a more robust solution is called for.
More as I get more time to experiment.
