Revopoint Trackit Review: Heavyweight 3D Scanner Lightens Your Workload

The Revopoint Trackit is a two-piece optical tracking 3D scanner designed to bring industrial-grade metrology technology within reach of engineers, reverse or otherwise, and serious product designers at a price point that doesn’t require a capital expenditure sign-off.

Where the company’s other scanning tech does a reasonable job – provided you’re willing to put the effort in creating the conditions for them to excel – the Trackit takes a massive leap forward with its tracking tower, watching the scanner itself and using that information to keep the data captured making spatial sense. Comparable systems from brands like Creaform exceed tens of thousands of dollars. The Trackit retails at less than $5K.

We’re not suggesting that the Trackit outperforms such systems, but its cumulative accuracy is far closer to them than Revopoint’s entry level options, with design forethought like temperature tracking for optimal performance and a carbon-fiber frame, which is not only light, but dimensionally stable. Let’s dig in.

The Revopoint Trackit consists of two distinct units: a long, wide-headed tracker and a fist-shaped scanner. Together they form an “outside-in” capture system, a configuration that has existed in professional metrology for years but has never really been accessible at this price point before.

In all, the system comes in two large, wheelable flight cases – one each for the tracking tower and scanning unit. Each core part is accompanied by tripods and automatic gimbals, which are used exclusively for calibration.

Beyond this, there’s a several-meter-long loom of cables to hook the system up, plus calibration boards and a positioning mat to help you position the various components optimally when calibrating.

The calibration process itself is extensive, and tied to the specific board that ships with the scanner, which you have to validate as a part of the process. We found some mismatches between the printed instructions in the box and the guidance given by the software, leading to some moments of head scratching, before continuing with the digital, and presumably up-to-date, instructions.

A note on the software: The Trackit uses a dedicated version of Revopoint's scanning software; Revo Track. This is currently only available on Windows, so if you’re a Mac user with no intention of buying a new system just for the Trackit, you miss out on this beginner-friendly on-ramp.

There are two phases in the calibration: one for the tracking tower, which is automatic and uses gimbals (provided in the box); one for the scanner, which requires manual movement from you, the user.

In all, it took me a casual afternoon’s work, switching my attention between the scanner’s calibrations and other printing tasks in the All3DP lab. Expect the unboxing to take all of half an hour’s careful work.

The scanner and tower’s calibrations require the devices to be at optimal temperature – mid 20s °C – with a half-hour’s warm-up time baked into the first-time setup. If you work in a cool location, that may be something to wrestle with, getting the scanner and tower up to optimal temps.

Overall, put aside a couple of hours’ time for calibration. The tower’s process requires you to reposition things up to the edge of its tracking range, meaning some 4+ meter’s distance. Don’t start the calibration in a tight space.

The scanner captures geometry using structured blue laser light, while the tracker ensures precise spatial alignment and reduced drift. Because the tracker only needs to maintain line of sight with the scanner – not the object itself – and because the scanner is absolutely riddled with tracking markers, the Trackit’s power is in the scanning of dark, shiny and metallic objects, as well as large spans that would typically require painstaking tracking marker placement. In addition to shortcutting that kind of work, it’s also a fundamental advantage over feature-based tracking, which has a tendency to drift: the system always knows where the scanner is in space, rather than relying on the object’s surface to stitch frames together.

Objects ranging from 10 mm to 6 meters in size can be captured, with measurement speeds reaching up to 1.5 million points per second. For larger workpieces that exceed the tracker’s stationary field of view, you can “leapfrog” the base station, repositioning incrementally around the object as you go. Doing this requires the use of anchor blocks or trackers, though, with the tracking tower needing to see five anchors shared between repositions in order to figure out and stitch multiple moves together. Magnetic anchor blocks are provided with the Trackit, as well as some removable, adhesive-backed tracking dots.

The scanner offers two distinct blue laser modes. The 30-line cross-laser mode delivers high-precision, high-efficiency scanning of surface areas, including direct capture of black, reflective, and metallic surfaces. The single blue laser line is optimized for fine scanning of narrow geometry – deep holes, grooves, and recessed features where a broad projection pattern would be inadequate. In practise, the distinction between the two tracks. We were able to eke out more usable detail in deeper recesses and holes using the single line mode, and the crossed lines does a general purpose job of capturing larger areas quickly.

It became clear during scanning that, even though our system was technically capable of running Revo Track, pushing a system to its limits does bottleneck performance – in single-line mode particularly, requiring far longer to capture enough detail to work with.

The blue laser operates at 460 nm wavelength. Single-frame precision reaches 0.02 mm, with volumetric accuracy of 0.02 mm + 0.04 mm × L(m), according to Revopoint. High-sensitivity temperature sensors continuously monitor both the scanner and tracker, alerting you to the possibility of thermally induced drift. Internal fans keep it from getting too hot during extended scanning sessions, while a “warm-up” interval is suggested at start-up if the scanner is too cold.

The scanning unit itself weighs 1.2 kg, a little over double any of the Revopoint Metro models. At the core of the scanning… “gauntlet,” for lack of a better word, is your typical wand-type scanner with onboard controls to adjust the exposure, as well as a pause button and mode switcher. The mode switcher is particularly useful, effectively full-screening the scan in progress when you need a better look at things but are a distance from your computer. You can also use these controls to adjust exposure when scanning in manual mode.

Less obvious, but exceptionally helpful, is that you can hold the scanner by its frame, mitigating its weight and taking the load off awkward positions and angles that would otherwise be a pain in the wrist during extended scanning sessions.

The Trackit is compatible only with Revopoint’s Revo Track software, which is free and standard with the scanner. Revopoint offers two additional paid programs that expand the Trackit’s usefulness further, though. There’s Revo Measure (~$500/y), ideally suited for metrology workflows including geometric dimensioning and tolerance analysis, scan-to-CAD comparison, deviation mapping, and inspection reporting; and Revo Design (~$500/y), a fully-featured reverse engineering tool that lets you quickly extract CAD-friendly analogs of your scanned data.

It’s all powered by QuickSurface, which is available independently but lacks the direct linkup between Revo Track for quickly porting work between the programs. Alternatively, for direct to print workflows, Revo Design Personal (~$225/y) does all the reverse engineering-ey stuff, but exports only STLs.