The Artec Leo is the latest handheld 3D scanner from Luxembourg-based Artec 3D. The company describes the Leo as “a quantum leap” above its best-selling Eva handheld scanner, in terms of both functionality and scanning speed.
The biggest upgrade is that the Artec Leo includes an on-board NVIDIA GPU for real-time processing—an industry first, according to Artec. This processor powers Leo’s built-in scanning software, so there’s no need to connect the Leo to a computer in order to scan. Users can view their scans in real-time on the Leo’s adjustable touchscreen display. For post-processing, the Leo’s 3D scan data can be transferred over Wi-Fi. The Leo is powered by swappable lithium ion batteries, making it a fully wireless handheld 3D scanner.
We couldn’t help but ask for a hands-on look. Artec 3D sent us a review unit of the Artec Leo so we could see it scan first-hand.
Artec Leo Video Review
Watch our video review of the Artec Leo to see the handheld 3D scanner in action. For full details, read the article below.
The Artec Leo 3D Scanner
The Artec Leo is a serious piece of equipment. We’ve looked at entry-level 3D scanners before (like the Matter and Form V2) but the Artec Leo is the first industrial-grade scanner we’ve reviewed, and it shows right off the bat. The Leo comes in a heavy-duty hard case with slots for the scanner, cables, and spare batteries that practically begs you to take the Leo into the field. The cherry on top is the hardcore wooden crate Artec uses for shipping.
Industrial-grade equipment doesn’t always look pretty, but the Artec Leo has a sleek and modern design (though it does remind me a bit of a cartoon robot). The top half of the Leo includes dual lenses on the business end and a 5” touchscreen on the other. The touchscreen is on a hinge so users can adjust the angle when pointing the Leo downwards. There’s also a microSD slot on the underside of the head to augment the 256GB of on-board storage.
The grip of the Leo includes a red trigger for starting and stopping scans and making you feel like you’re wielding a powerful laser weapon (but you’re not; the Leo is a Class 1 Laser product and thus completely safe for humans). The base of the Artec Leo includes a power port, Ethernet port, and the battery compartment.
The Artec Leo is designed for medium-to-large objects, from a gearbox up to an automobile. You can use the Leo for objects as small as a coffee cup and as large as a small boat, but at these edges Artec 3D offers other scanners to do the job better.
The Leo offers a 3D resolution up to 0.2mm and accuracy up to 0.1mm. It’s got a speedy 3D reconstruction rate of 80 frames per second (for comparison, the Artec Eva scans at 16 FPS). This means that users can scan as quickly as they can run (literally—as long as you point the scanner properly and feel like a workout). Like all of Artec’s scanners, the Leo is target-free, which means users don’t have to place special targets around their objects to orient the scanner.
The Artec Leo includes an NVIDIA Jetson TX1 processor, which allows for real-time 3D reconstruction using built-in software. Consequently, you won’t need to connect the Leo to a computer while scanning. Nor will you need to connect it to power, since it’s powered by a swappable battery. In Artec’s words, the Leo is tetherless, which in my words, is good.
The Artec Leo is an industrial-grade scanner and comes with an industrial-grade price tag of $29,800 (recommended retail price; may vary by region). For post-processing, you’ll need to license Artec Studio 15 editing software for $1200 per year.
How to 3D Scan With the Artec Leo
Despite the fact that the Artec Leo is a handheld scanner with no wires and a trigger that begs to be squeezed, there’s much more to a successful 3D scan than simply pointing-and-shooting. I learned that lesson from Artec 3D’s Vadim Zaremba, a Technical Support Engineer who graciously (and patiently) led me through the entire scanning process.
“You have to plan ahead a little bit,” Zaremba explained.
As it turns out, 3D scanning is a bit of an art, and like all art, the first thing to consider is your subject. In our case, our subject is our object and our objective is to scan our subject (before you object, I won’t subject you to any more frivolous wordplay).
You can 3D scan many objects with the Artec Leo, but there are some limits. We’ve already discussed the optimal object size for the Leo (ranging from gearbox to automobile) but size isn’t everything. We must also account for the geometry and texture of our object.
Let’s pause for a moment to understand how the Artec Leo works. The Leo is a structured-light scanner, which sends out a known pattern of light and observes how it’s deformed to calculate the geometry of an object. Depending on the object you’re trying to scan, this doesn’t always work well. Transparent and reflective materials can be difficult, and may require a coat of scanning spray to make them scan-able (in a pinch, deodorant powder spray does the trick).
Each time the Artec Leo sends out a structured light pattern and calculates geometry, it creates what’s called a frame. The Leo scans at 80 frames per second. However, the Leo needs a way to stitch all these frames together. To accomplish this, many structured-light 3D scanners use special targets as a common reference point between frames. These must be placed around the object prior to scanning. The Artec Leo, however, is a target-less scanner, and uses a combination of geometry and texture information for combining different frames. While this is a convenient feature, it means the Artec Leo has trouble scanning symmetric geometry with an invariant or repetitive texture. For example, a flat white wall or a smooth metal cylinder would not provide enough geometry or texture details to serve as reference points between frames.
Fortunately, there are workarounds for such objects. You could add texture information, such as taking a sharpie and scribbling all over the wall (if anyone gets mad at you for this, scan them until they go away). You could also add extraneous geometry, such as surrounding your smooth metal cylinder with figurines from your desk. A textured background works well too, like putting your object on a patterned tablecloth as you scan. Note that while the Leo scans in color, it can’t use colors as a reference, so try to picture all your references in black and white to predict if they’ll work (e.g., red and green stickers would not be differentiable to the Leo). In general, the more geometry and texture information you can add to your scene, the better your scan will work.Surely now we’re ready to point-and-shoot, right? Not quite. There’s a few different settings on the Artec Leo to understand first. The most important one is the ON setting, which you can activate by pressing the power button to the left of the touchscreen. Make sure you’ve inserted the battery first (you can also power the Leo directly through the 90W adaptor if you’re willing to tether yourself to an outlet). First time users of the Artec Leo will need to sign in with an Artec 3D account.
One of the Leo’s marquee features is its support of Artec HD Mode, which is driven by a proprietary neural engine to deliver much more detailed 3D data than the standard SD Mode. Leo is one of only two Artec 3D scanners that offers HD mode (the other is the Artec Eva).
HD Mode is off by default on the Artec Leo, so users who want the highest possible scan quality will want to turn it on in the settings. You can choose what portion of frames you want captured in HD, from 1/8 to all. The more HD frames captured, the higher the scan quality, but the bigger the file size and the more post-processing required. For most use cases, 1/8 HD is sufficient. A similar setting, “Optimize project size,” will search for and discard repetitive frames while scanning. Unless you’re scanning highly reflective surfaces and need extra texture info, you’ll probably want this setting enabled (both HD Mode and “Optimize project size” are off by default).
Finally, we’re ready to pull the trigger and start scanning. But it’s still not just point-and-shoot—we need to do it properly. There are two important things we must keep track of: distance from the object and angle of the scanner.
You want to make sure you keep an even distance between the scanner and the object, roughly a meter. There’s a range setting that can be turned as high as 1.8m to capture background information, though the object itself should always be about a meter from the scanner. Helpfully, the Artec Leo includes a distance overlay that reveals in real-time if you’re keeping the right distance—green is good, red is too close, and blue is too far.
As for angle, you want the scanner to be normal to the surface of your object. The closer you are to 90 degrees, the better the geometry data you capture. On some surfaces, this can result in a glare from the Leo’s LEDs. In these cases, it’s good to capture a few alternative angles which the Artec Studio post-processing software can use to automatically reduce glare.
Pressing the Leo’s trigger once opens a scan preview. Pressing it again starts scanning (no need to hold it down). Now you can simply go around the object and build up your 3D scan. The distance overlay will help you keep the right distance. Make sure to keep your object in the center of the touchscreen display—if you lose track of your object, the scan will automatically stop and you must re-center and pull the trigger to resume.
In addition to the distance overlay, there’s a quality overlay that turns green on areas of the object that have been sufficiently scanned and turns red on areas that need more attention. By toggling between the distance and quality overlays, you can clearly see how your scan is going and when you’ve scanned enough. The Artec Leo is 5.4lbs with the battery, but don’t worry if your arm gets tired. As long as you don’t change the geometry of your scene, you can take a break and come back to scanning whenever you’re ready.
Scanning with the Artec Leo takes a bit of practice, but eventually you get the hang of keeping the distances and angles consistent. The touchscreen is great for keeping track of the scan, and it can angle downward by about 70 degrees for when you’re scanning the top of an object. However, other angles can be tricky to see properly. Thankfully, you can cast the Leo screen to a browser on your computer simply by entering its IP address, giving you a bigger screen that doesn’t move along with the Leo. The cast can lag a bit depending on your Wi-Fi, but generally it’s a useful tool.
I was quite impressed with the battery life of the Artec Leo. Each full scan, including transferring the data for post processing, only drains about 10 percent of the battery. Artec claims the Leo battery is good for up to 6 hours of scanning, though I suspect you’ll never quite hit that amount. Regardless, with a spare battery or two, you could spend the whole day scanning (though spare batteries aren’t cheap; Artec sells them for $850 a pop).
Using Artec Studio 15 for Post-Processing 3D Scans
Once your scan is complete, the next step is post-processing with Artec Studio 15. There are three ways to transfer 3D scan data from the Artec Leo to Artec Studio 15: over Wi-Fi (direct connection or through your network), using an Ethernet cable (direct or through your network), or using a MicroSD card (this method does not currently support HD Mode data). Since my computer didn’t have an Ethernet port and I had HD scan data, I used the direct Wi-Fi connection.
It’s important that your post-processing computer is powerful enough to run Artec Studio 15. You’ll need a GPU, and a fairly good one, along with at least 32GB of ram. My regular laptop was not up to snuff, but luckily I had at hand the Asus ProArt StudioBook One with an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 and 64GB of RAM. Here’s a list of several laptops and their tested performance in Artec Studio 15. You’ll also want to make sure Windows and all graphics drivers are up-to-date.
Artec Studio 15 is a sophisticated application, and we can’t cover everything (“It’s like trying to learn Photoshop in an hour,” Zaremba commented during our training session). But your scan won’t be anywhere close to finished without some post-processing, so we’ll go over the basics.
Start by importing your 3D scan data. I didn’t have a gearbox or a small boat lying around, so I scanned my guitar. After import, Artec Studio 15 looks something like this:It looks like an overlapping mess because I did two different scans of the guitar, one for the top half and one for the bottom. The top half scan—the first subfolder in the object panel on the right—is itself subdivided into two scans, as I stopped and started once while scanning. We can combine both halves of the guitar together as long as there is some shared geometry—in this case, the sides of the guitar. Note that the guitar was placed on a colorful carpet to serve as an additional texture reference.
One of the most important things we must do is a process called global registration, which takes the frames and precisely aligns them to a single coordinate system. We do this for both of our scans (top and bottom of the guitar). There’s a number of parameters we can adjust here, depending on the specific scan and how long we’re willing to wait for the algorithm, but I’ll leave it to the Artec Studio manual to elaborate. If you see a problem after registration (as in the picture below), you hit undo, adjust the parameters, and try again until it works (failing that, you’ll have to re-scan).
Now we’re ready to remove the extraneous detail from our scans—namely, the carpet. Artec Studio provides a set of handy editing tools, including an eraser, which we’ll use to isolate the guitar in both of our scans.
Now it’s time to align the top and bottom of our guitar. The process is easy—we simply pick pairs of points representing geometry shared by our two scans, such as the tip of the headstock. With three such pairs, Artec Studio has enough info to line up the scans.
With our scans aligned, we must do another round of global registration to ensure that the frames between our scans are in their proper spot. Once that’s done, if there’s any little bits of geometry floating around that we didn’t erase, we can run the data through an outlier removal filter to clean it up.
The next step is what Artec refers to as the most interesting part of processing: the creation of a polygonal 3D model (aka mesh) from the scan data. In Artec Studio 15, this process is called fusion. Again, there are a few different parameters to play with here, and we can’t cover them all. The most important parameter is the 3D resolution of our mesh, which corresponds to the mean distance between points (in millimeters). The lower this value, the sharper the mesh.
Note that the 3D resolution is limited by our 3D scan error rate, an internal parameter which is shown in the object panel on the right of Artec Studio. The higher the scan error rate, the coarser we must set our mesh resolution (Artec provides a table matching error rate to mesh resolution, though as of writing it does not include the Leo nor HD Mode). For the guitar, the max error rate was 0.4, so I selected a mesh resolution of 0.5mm.
After fusion, the guitar looks much sharper.
In the properties panel for the fusion mesh (bottom right), we can see it has a polygon count of just over 5 million. We probably don’t need quite that many polygons, so we can use another tool called fast mesh simplification to reduce our count by about two thirds (a rough heuristic, dependent on object size and level of detail). This helps us keep our file size down and doesn’t impact the geometry much.
We’re almost done now. The final step is to add the texture information back to our mesh in the form of a standard UV map. We can generate this map with the texture data from the original scans, or use another source of texture data if we have one.
N.B.: A couple times I prematurely started the texture algorithm, but when I tried to cancel it, Artec Studio would hang indefinitely. I had to force quit the program and ended up losing much of my progress. I say this both to humble myself (this somehow happened to me twice) and to remind you to save your work often.
One option in texture mapping is to reduce glare, which the algorithm can only do if it has sufficient scan data without glare (for shiny surfaces, this is why you want to scan at a few different angles besides the standard 90 degrees).
Once the texture mapping is finished, we can make basic adjustments like brightness, saturation, and contrast.
And with that, we’re past post-processing. All that’s left to do is to export our mesh, which we can do in a number of file formats including .ply, .stl, .wrl, .obj, .asc, .aop, .ptx, .x, .xyzrgb, or .e57. I went with .obj for the guitar. The result is not perfect—you can see some geometry that didn’t quite align properly on the bottom left of the guitar—but for a 3D scanning novice, I’m pleased with the result. That’s my guitar alright; I can practically hear the flat chords and out-of-time strumming.
Conclusion
In an international market saturated with handheld 3D scanners, the Artec Leo differentiates itself through its convenience. With its NVIDIA processor, local scanning software, touchscreen display, Wi-Fi connectivity, and swappable battery, the Artec Leo is a true wireless scanner. However, these features also make the Leo heavier than most handheld scanners, which can be tiring for the user.
The Leo also delivers on scan quality, with high accuracy (0.1mm) and fine resolution (0.2mm) thanks to Artec 3D’s AI-powered HD Mode. Users requiring even greater accuracy must turn to other scanners or combine the Leo with a third-party photogrammetry kit.
With a $30,000 price tag, the Artec Leo is in the mid-to-high end of handheld 3D scanners, which range from a few thousand dollars to fifty thousand or more. You’ll also need to factor into the price Artec Studio 15 licensing costs ($1200/year) and accessories like spare batteries ($850).
It’s also important to consider the time it takes to learn how to operate the Leo and use Artec Studio 15. If you’re new to 3D scanning, it’s going to take at least a few scans before you feel comfortable with the process and can start getting the best possible results. There’s an art to it, and all artists need practice.
Whether or not the Artec Leo is the best 3D scanner for you depends entirely on your needs. What kind of objects do you need to scan, and for what purpose? What level of accuracy and resolution do you require? Do you need portability or do you plan to scan all objects in one environment? What’s your budget?
If the Artec Leo suits your scanning needs, it’s an easy recommendation. It’s well-built and easy to use given minor training and a bit of practice. The same is true of the Leo’s post-processing software, Artec Studio 15. HD Mode provides high resolution scans with excellent texture and geometry detail, and users have fine control over the balance between scan quality and processing requirements. The Leo’s completely wireless convenience is something I would certainly miss in other handheld 3D scanners.
For more information on the Artec Leo, visit Artec3D.com.