Scanning a supercar

Last week, I went, with 2 colleagues, to work on a scanning project of a concept car for a Canadian company named HTT. Their car, a hand-made and hand-assembled prototype, now has the look and shape they are looking for. The thing is that they do not have any 3D models to design the frame, suspension and interior of the car. These models will also be needed to make the moulds used to manufacture the carbon fibre parts for the production cars. They had a very tight schedule – on September 10^th, they were shipping the car to Frankfurt for an auto show and they wanted the car to be scanned prior to shipping. We had two days to scan the entire exterior, the mating surfaces and the interior. We used our laser scanner with photogrammetry capabilities to first acquire a referential – once this was acquired, the HTT people were able to work on the car to prep it for the autoshow, while we completed the scanning process. It didn’t matter if the car moved because the targets were fixed on the vehicle. With the scans acquired, we will work on the surfaces to get perfect lines and a symmetric car.

Keep in mind that the car was hand-made so it isn’t perfect. From now on, they can ship the vehicle without worries and if something unfortunate happens, at least they have the model to build another one!