3DMakerPro Turtle Review: A Capable, Customizable Scanner with a Satifying Snap

The kinds of objects you can comfortably scan (and how) with the Turtle depend on the modules you have.

If you only have a camera module and the battery grip, then you have to tether the scanner to a computer via USB-C. The provided 1.5-meter long cable is sufficiently long to get decent angles on objects without having to reposition your computer.

Using the control pad gives you the greatest amount of movement freedom, though as with any wireless, self-contained scanner, being able to angle it any which way also means losing sight of the display and the knowledge that the scanner has a tracking lock and is collecting data.

You only have access to “easy scan” mode, which is to say freehand, on the control pad. Here, you have control over the detail level, table removal (useful for shortcutting the post-processing later), brightness adjustment, and whether to capture texture (color.) On our test unit, there appeared to be a reflection or light leak of some kind in the L camera module, resulting in a fixed hotspot in the live preview that wouldn’t go away. Neither of our S nor M modules has this. It doesn’t appear to affect the results of scans, but does ruin the preview while scanning.

Handily, you can tether a camera module and grip to the control pad, giving you more freedom of movement.

Scanning with the Turtle runs pretty smoothly. I didn’t find the feature tracking lacking, with it quickly snapping back into place after a little backtracking. It handled uniform and patterned surfaces better than similar machines from other brands, avoiding errors from ambiguous features that often trip scanners up.

It took 50% of the control pad battery to capture two 1,300+ frame scans, clean the clouds and prepare for alignment, align, and then fuse them to a watertight mesh, including hole-filling, mesh cleanup and texture mapping. The scan is of a 3D print we designed just for scanning, with one deep hole that most scanners fail to see enough of to accurately capture, plus ambiguous patterns that can confuse feature tracking. The Turtle, using the medium camera module, handled it better than other scanners we’ve tried using only feature-based tracking.

It stands to reason that using the Turtle intensively drains the battery before your eyes. You can hear the internal fan kick in and work hard to move air and keep its processor cool.

The live preview of the scan in progress shows you what you’re capturing, though it would be nice if it gave you a sign of whether enough points are being captured or not. As it is, you just get a scramble of green blocks showing something registering, but they jitter in and out of existence and you’re left without a clear idea of whether an area is covered well or not.

There are limitations on the size of scan you can do handheld with the compute module – up to 2,000 frames in a single scan. This is a sizable stretch of scanning, made to feel particularly generous at the low frame rate the Turtle operates at using the control pad. It is, generally, better to take multiple scans and stitch them together.

When tethered to a computer, that limitation goes up to 3,000 frames. Approach this and the software recommends you chunk the work into pieces and stitch the results together using the align function.

3DMakerPro’s software comes branded under parent company JM Meta as JMStudio and is available on Windows and macOS. We tested the Windows version. You have to log in to a 3DMakerPro account to use the software and no single sign-on options like Google, Microsoft or Apple are given.

Two scan modes are available to you in JMStudio – “Easy scan” (which is, basically, freehand) and table scan (assuming the scanner is fixed to a tripod and pointing at a turntable).

For our testing, we captured a solid dozen or so scans completely wirelessly first, with the intention to complete a mixture of onboard processing and also transfer some scans to a computer for processing, assuming that’d be a trivial thing to do.

For file transfers, I started big: a batch of eight scans totaling 22 GB. The scanner spent 15 minutes compressing the folder before hanging mid-transfer for over an hour and failing. Lesson learned – start smaller. A single scan compressed and sent quickly. It’s important to note that issues with JMStudio almost always stem from the software not having the necessary permissions to write files to your system. Transfers would simply fail silently until we realized during our testing what the problem was. Even then, some still failed or hung long enough for us to decide to cut our losses and try again.

You can’t simply plug in a cable to access the control pad’s storage like rival scanners allow. Instead, your options are inserting a USB-C thumb drive, connecting your PC to the scanner using its hotspot (forcing your computer offline), or transferring via local Wi-Fi by manually typing in your PC’s IP address. It’s recommended that you use a 5Ghz Wi-Fi network for transferring files, with 3DMakerPro stating a 3 GB file can transfer in 35 seconds. Maybe that’s right, but we didn’t see anything approaching this.

I suspect the reality is that 3DMakerPro’s connectivity system is fragile and trips up on anything other than perfect conditions.

Defenders of 3DMakerPro’s software may argue it’s just a workflow learning curve and question of experience, but there is a cumulative effect from things like the lack of basic signposting and silent failure modes that lie outside simply knowing which buttons to push in the software.

If you can find a happy spot somewhere in the middle where it works for you, terrific. Our feeling is that this is not the place every user of the Turtle will land.

Merging scans is a pretty hands-off affair, with the automatic alignment usually doing a decent job, provided there’s enough overlap between the chosen clouds. If you find yourself with an ambitious project that’s dependent on multiple scans coming together, better to push them over to the desktop software where a manual alignment mode, plus bigger display and a mouse or trackpad, helps you to place points more accurately.

Once you do get your data where it needs to go, the mesh generation itself produces solid 24-bit color scans and clean exports across standard OBJ, STL, PLY, and ASC formats. Mesh resolution can reach 0.05 mm on the S module down to 0.10 mm on the L module, though whether you can reduce noise enough to make those resolutions count is more a matter of object preparation and care scanning than the scanner’s ability to render it. Working handheld, as the system is set up for, introduces noise.

Be prepared to plug the Turtle in if you’re trying to stitch high detail or large models. It takes a long time. The processors on such handheld scanners are typically 8-core mobile processors – not earth-shakingly powerful – and 3D scanning is a graphically intensive application. All of these kinds of devices will chug to a slow with large scans, and particularly when you apply the many steps of processing that can follow a scan such as hole filling, noise reduction, mesh simplification, and texturing.

There is a standard tripod thread on the battery grip, but not the control pad. No tripod is included in any of the sets of the Turtle currently available.

I like the Turtle hardware a lot. It feels good in the hand and it doesn’t take much effort to quickly capture a lot of detailed scan data. The structured blue light is a country-mile ahead of IR-based scanners in everyday conditions, and for that reason I’d actually take it over most of them. That, added to the flexibility of choosing what you need from the scanner and its variety of modules is a terrific combination.

To really enjoy the Turtle though, you have to put up with a software experience that’s inconsistent across all of the control pad, desktop, and the connections between. Arbitrary frustrations like forcing the user to log in simply to use the software, hoops to jump through to transfer massive files, failing silently and inadequate signposting of what’s happening, in aggregate, can be quite annoying.

There are, I’m sure, perfect conditions of network and computer where the Turtle’s files flutter effortlessly into the software for processing, but I haven’t seen it, and I think this unpredictability is something you should keep in mind before buying the Turtle, particularly if you intend to scan wirelessly and process files on your computer later.

Without the control pad, the scanning tech is great and, provided the software behaves for you, you’ll be able to conjure up fast, detailed scans in short order. The biggest consideration in that arrangement is that the battery grip empties quickly. With the control pad, and the Turtle’s great scanning ability goes authentically mobile in a capable way – but again, be ready to have to charge it frequently.

Ultimately, it’s a fine scanning companion and worth persisting with. The limitations have nothing to do with the actual scanning, which is really quite good.

3DMakerPro Turtle

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