Looking for information from people with experience scanning large sections of vehicles to design things like bumpers roof racks etc.

Creality 3D scanner 3D Scanner
,
1

Good afternoon, I’m looking at purchasing the CR Scan Otter, and my primary use would be scanning vehicles so I can design custom parts. Specifically, I want to remove bumpers from vehicles, scan the front ends, and use that data to design custom bumpers. I’d also like to scan roofs and factory mounting holes so I can design roof racks, safari racks, and similar products.

I’m curious if anyone here has real-world experience with this type of workflow.

How complicated is the process overall, and how well does the scanner actually perform for automotive work?

A friend of mine tried something similar in the past with a $10,000 scanner and mentioned that scanning the front of a truck and converting it into a usable format for CAD took around 40 hours, and that you really needed a laser scanner to make the process practical. I’m not sure if that information is outdated or if the technology has improved since then.

For reference, I use Fusion 360 for CAD.

My expectation was that the process would be closer to a couple of days total — scanning the vehicle, cleaning up the mesh, and getting it into a format that I can start designing from (for example, building a bumper or safari rack around the scan data).

If anyone here has experience scanning vehicles for large fabrication or product design, I’d really appreciate hearing about your experiences. Thank you

2

It kind of works, I even scanned a car with a Ferret Pro before I had the Otter and the Raptor.
A laser scanner will give you a higher resolution, but for a whole car you can’t scan it in 0.02mm resolution anyway because that would not fit in the RAM for post processing.
With laser scanners there’s also a difference, the laser line scanning and the cross laser scanning like the more expensive scanners (Raptor Pro/X or Sermoon series) support it. With cross laser scanning it’s much faster. But all laser scanning needs markers.
The IR scanning with the Otter needs feature or texture (or also markers), so for large flat areas like a hood you have to give it some orientation for example with stickers or also by using markers.
Generally you can scan a car with the Otter, how long it takes depends on the car, the scanning method (using markers or not) and your skill (it needs a bit of training to get the coordination with the scanner right in my opinion).
If a NIR scanner like the Otter is sufficient depends on your precision requirements. The output file of the Creality Scan software is a STL, OBJ or PLY file that you can import in CAD software.
If you do need to reverse engineer it and get a format that you can edit, that takes extra software and takes longer.