ScanTo3D | OpalAi vs Farm3D

ScanTo3D by OpalAi is a 3D generation app for iPhone Pro and iPad Pro that turns LiDAR walkthrough scans into floor plans, point clouds, and BIM-ready models. You walk through a space with your phone, capture geometry in InstaCAD or LiDAR mode, and export digital twins in formats like OBJ, GLTF, STL, and USDZ. It targets property owners, contractors, and facility teams who need as-built documentation without hauling a dedicated scanner.

Compared to renting tripod LiDAR hardware, ScanTo3D trades equipment cost for device requirements and optional cloud processing. InstaCAD mode builds 2D floor plans and 3D CAD models in real time for spaces under 2,000 square feet, while LiDAR mode handles larger environments with no hard size cap though OpalAi recommends keeping each scan under about 5,000 square feet.

Site managers, real estate teams, and construction sales staff use it for quick floor plans, ANSI-compliant gross living area calculations, and textured 3D exports. OpalAi claims less than 1 inch of error per 30 feet and about 98% accuracy on generated floor plans and BIM objects.

Farm3D is a research method for single-view 3D reconstruction of articulated animals, built at the University of Oxford and published at 3DV 2024. You feed it one photo of a horse, cow, or sheep and it returns a full 3D shape with texture in seconds, without training on real photographs. The project page documents the approach, shows reconstruction demos, and links to code and the Animodel benchmark dataset.

Most 3D generators need large labeled 3D datasets or multi-view captures. Farm3D trains entirely on synthetic views produced by Stable Diffusion, then uses the same diffusion model as a critic during learning. That lets it recover fine details like legs and ears on categories it never saw in real images, which is unusual for monocular reconstruction pipelines that rely on real-world supervision.

Researchers studying articulated 3D shape, computer vision engineers prototyping animal asset pipelines, and 3D artists exploring controllable synthesis will find the demos and open code useful. The method also supports relighting, texture swapping between same-category models, and skeletal animation once a shape is generated.