The Ultimate Guide for a 3D Body Scan using a Smartphone: Tips and Tricks to get the perfect scan

Scanning is not scary

Scanning can sound really intimidating, but what if I told you scanning just meant taking a bunch of photos? And luckily, that’s all that scanning really is. You give the app enough pictures and angles to create a 3D model in a process called photogrammetry. The best app on the market is KIRI Engine. Available on all smartphones and 3 free scans per month, KIRI Engine creates the most consistent high-quality scans on the market. 

Hopefully, that demystified scanning for you, and we can focus on the actual process of taking photos for a scan. You can imagine that if you wanted to know the shape of this object, you would need multiple angles to see all the differing facets to confidently identify it; The same is true for scanning. You are simply trying to get a 360° view of the body to the software. 

Getting Started

Let’s get into the process of actually scanning!

The scanner will start at the front of the scannee (person getting scanned). With smooth motions, the scanner will start to walk around the scannee while continuously taking photos. They will stay about 2-3 feet away from the scannee and create a large circle around said scannee. Once they take 100 photos, they are done scanning and can upload the photos to be turned into a scan. 

The only added difficulty to scanning people is that humans do this thing called breathing. This causes issues over longer periods of scanning since it causes the person being scanned to move. The greatest way to avoid this problem is to minimize the time spent taking the pictures. Keeping the total scanning time to less than 1 minute is the most important aspect to getting a high-quality scan. 

Here is a video tutorial for scanning that puts everything together. Scanning Tutorial

Summary of Tips and Tricks

1. Take less than 1 min to take all the photos

2. Make sure to shoot in good lighting

3. Take multiple scans to pick the best one

4. Make sure no hair is covering the scannee’s neck