While prepping to crash some motorcycles at WREX this year, I saw Jason Arst (master recon, consistent experimenter) spraying the bikes with a can of something I didn’t recognize while scanning with his Leo.

A can of snake oil?

Scanning chrome or dark, shiny things is notoriously difficult, hence the plethora of available scanning sprays, homemade or otherwise. When we’re scanning cars for the Lightpoint database, our current go-to is AESUB Blue, but every now and again a dealer gets squeamish about us spraying a car with a visible film, even though it generally vanishes in a few minutes. Additionally, the spray pattern is visible in the scan data. So, I was interested when I saw Jason using a can of AESUB Transparent. However, I had one eyebrow raised high, like Dwayne Johnson high…as did Jason.

We did a bit of testing this week, scanning the rear bumper of my Tundra with the Leica RTC360. Sunny SoCal day, one scan location, three scans: no spray, AESUB Blue, AESUB Transparent. The results are below.

The scanner was ~3 feet high, hence the messy bottom edge. The sun also baked the sprays off pretty quickly, and I think that’s largely responsible for any small gaps in the sprayed-data. Ultimately though, I was really impressed with the invisible spray. Turns out it’s not snake oil. I’m glad to add this tool to the kit, it’ll be nice to maintain the original appearance of the subject and avoid freaking out dealers when Mike’s scanning their high-end inventory.

Lou Peck
​Lightpoint | Axiom​

P.S. Speaking of scan data, if you'd like to learn more about working with point clouds in CloudCompare, Eugene Liscio's Zero to Hero course is coming up in a few days!