Creality Sermoon S1 review - Part 3: 3D scanning with Khadas Mind 2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB dock

At the end of last year, I received a Creality Sermoon S1 high-end 3D scanner for review. After checking the specifications and going through an unboxing in the first part of the review, I used the 3D scanner with an Intel Core i5-13500H laptop with 16GB of RAM running Creality Scan 4 software on Windows 11.

The laptop specs were below the minimum hardware requirements (NVIDIA GPU, 32GB RAM), and while I managed to scan a face and bust using infrared mode, it was a struggle with 4 to 5 FPS scanning, and I wasn’t able to use Blue light scanning at all. Luckily, shortly after the review, Khadas informed me they planned to send a Khadas Mind Graphics 2 dock featuring an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 560 Ti 16GB graphics card and a Mind 2 mini PC with 32GB of RAM and an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H 16-core Meteor Lake processor. What I didn’t know was that it would take around 5 months to receive it!

Nevertheless, I’ve already reviewed the Khadas Mind Graphics 2 with 3D graphics and AI workloads, so it’s finally time to test it with the Creality Sermoon S1 3D scanner. Since I’ve already gone through Crealite Scan 4 software installation, firmware update, and calibration in the previous review, I’ll focus on re-testing infrared mode to check performance and trying Blue mode scanning for detailed objects.

Infrared mode scanning with Sermoon S1 + Khadas Mind 2 Graphics

When installing Creality Scan 4 software, it will estimate the performance of the host, and I went from a “Poor PC performance” on my laptop with up to 9 FPS in blue laser mode, and 16 FPS in infrared mode, to “Excellent PC performance” with the Khadas Mind 2 mini PC and Mind 2 Graphics dock handling up to 90 FPS in blue laser mode and 30 FPS in infrared mode.

I also had to update the scanner firmware and decided to redo the calibration since it had been over 6 months. The calibration was much easier with the higher frame rate, and it took me only 2 to 3 minutes to complete.

Let’s try a scan in infrared mode using a largish Santa Claus plush toy.

It was night and day compared to the previous review. On the faster NVIDIA-based machine, I completed the 3D scan in just over 2 minutes, compared to 15 minutes on the Intel laptop. The frame rate is 21 FPS on the screenshot, but most of the time it was around 29 FPS.

There were some extra parts and holes in the scan, but after going through Fusion and Mesh processing with parameters like “Remove Isolated Parts”, “Fill Small Holes”, and enabling the “Water tight” option…

… the result looks fairly good. Note the Fusion part still took several minutes even as I reduced the number of triangles to 1.2 million.

Here’s a video showing the full scan.

That’s all good. As a reminder, infrared mode is best used for fast scanning and tracking of geometry (e.g., human faces and bodies, sculptures), texture (e.g., a porcelain vase with drawings), and markers for objects with insufficient geometry and texture.

Blue laser mode with Sermoon S1 3D scanner

Blue laser mode is best suited for high-accuracy, high-detail scans and typically requires markers. I could not use it at all with my laptop last time around; let’s give it a try now that I have a more powerful machine. Since it can be used on objects as small as 5 x 5 x 5mm and with high details, I decided to go with a 20 Bath commemorative coin.

The coin is just 32mm in diameter, and the text can be hard to read with the naked eye. It’s probably quite a difficult scan. On this type of shiny object, I’m also supposed to use scanning spray, but I will do without.

First, we need to prepare the desk by adding several 3mm tracking markers provided with the scanner. For small objects, markers are placed on the desk, but for larger objects, you can also place them on the object itself.

Let’s go to the Creality Scan software, create a new project, and start a Scan with Blue laser mode, with markers, Pointcloud scan mode, and parallel lines mode. Exclude flat base should also be selected.

For reference, three line modes are available:

Crossed Laser Lines – This mode uses a grid of lines to rapidly scan larger objects or broad areas. It is designed for efficiency from a greater distance and typically requires a lower marker density.
Parallel Laser Lines – This mode projects a set of parallel lines (7 lines) for close-up, high-precision scanning. It is best for capturing fine details on smaller objects or specific areas, and requires a higher marker density to maintain tracking accuracy.
Single Laser Line – This mode uses a 0.1mm thick single line to access deep holes, narrow gaps, and recessed areas that crossed or parallel lines cannot reach, ensuring metrology-grade accuracy in intricate details.

I went with the Parallel laser lines here. The scan is pretty quick to complete, but the level of detail is not sufficient. We need to switch to “Local Detail” scan mode and set the resolution is 0.05mm.

You need to select the area with fine details. For this coin, it’s basically the whole area. It will be red when selected.

We can now start to see some details like the text. Now I repeated the same procedure with another scan in the same project for the other side of the coin. I’d recommend cleaning the design, notably removing the blue dots around the coin for each scan. I did that after the fusion step, but the blobs kept reappearing even after I started the scans from scratch. It was extremely frustrating. I eventually did the final cleaning after the Meshing step. More on that later.

Let’s run the Fusion Batch Process on both scans, removing markers with ultra-detail and the finest resolution we can select. Noise removal was kept at 30%.

This is what one side of the coin looks like after Fusion. There are plenty of artifacts from the location of the markers, which is why I recommend cleaning before. The good news is that we can read text like “20 Baht” (๒๐ บาท). We still need to align the two faces of the coin with the “Alignment” tool.

The first time, I tried automatic alignment with markers, but it just merged the two faces instead of creating a coin. So I switched to manual feature alignment add point 1 to 4 to strategic locations for each face, forcing the program to rotate the face in the Floating window as shown above.

We can now go through the Meshing. I slightly reduced the number of triangles (maybe I shouldn’t have), selected “Remove Isolated Parts”, and “Fill Small Holes”. The screenshot below shows the result after the meshing process.

I still had to clean it up with the tools from the bottom toolbar. Here are the final results.

Here’s the video showing the “coin”. Obviously, the result is not ideal, since a lot of the text is not readable, and I didn’t scan the side of the coin quite enough.

Using scanning spray may have helped, or this coin just has too many small details to be properly scanned. I noticed another person scanned a simpler 20mm golden coin with scan-spray and got somewhat better results.

I decided to scan something easier in Blue laser mode but still with some level of detail: a comb. I added a few extra 6mm markers since the object is larger.

The process was similar to scanning the coins. I used Blue laser scanning with parallel lines with the default 0.5mm resolution.

It took less than one minute to get the shape of the comb since scanning was done smoothly at 90 FPS.

However, at this resolution, the Japanese text is not clear at all, so I enabled the “Local Detail” scan mode and selected the area.

I scanned the area again, and after a few seconds, the Japanese text became clear.

There was a lot of dirt around the scan, so this type around I cleaned it up before doing anything else. Select the parts you want to remove with the tools in the toolbar (red when selected) and select the delete icon.

It’s a bit hard to clean around the high-resolution area since the resolution shown is fairly low, so I went through the Fusion step first.

I did some more clean up around the Japanese characters after the Fusion was complete.

Since both sides of the combo are identical, I hoped for a duplicate scan function, but I didn’t find any. So I turned the comb around and repeated the steps above for a scan of the other side of the comb. Once the Fused scan was relatively clean, I used the same manual feature alignment as for the coin.

Once the Fusion was successful, I switched to the Mesh step. We can still see some yellow parts here and there. Those are open parts of the design.

The final step was to automatically close these by selecting the Hole Filling section in the Mesh Processing tab. I used the default values, and after clicking on Preview, the impacted areas were shown in red.

I got the final result, which you can check in the video below, and I find it looks pretty neat.

I also exported the file to STL to import it into Blender, and there was no issue. The scan would just benefit from a little more cleaning before printing it with a 3D printer.

Conclusion

The Creality Sermoon S1 is my first 3D scanner, so I can’t really compare it to others. It still looks like a great piece of equipment for detailed and large objects thanks to the blue laser and infrared modes. After a learning curve, I was able to perform some relatively decent scans with either method.

The scanner doesn’t work with Linux, so you’d need a Windows PC or a Mac computer, or alternatively, an Android smartphone or iPhone if you purchase a WiFi connection kit. It takes a little while to get used to the Creality Scan 4 software and the scanning process in general, so you may need to be patient if you’re new to 3D scanning.

The USB cable is great for achieving maximum frame rate, but for larger objects it will be a bit short. I had to adjust the position of the mini PC and Santa Claus plush toy when scanning when the cable was too short. WiFi is likely preferred for large objects (e.g., a car), although bandwidth may become an issue depending on parameters.

3D scanning is not a cheap hobby if you don’t do this as a commercial endeavor, and you’ll probably need to budget at least $4,000 if you don’t already own a powerful computer. The scanner itself costs $2,299 on Amazon or the Creality store, and as we’ve seen from the second part of the review, you can’t simply use any computer for it to be usable, and a $1,500+ machine is required. The Khadas Mind 2 and Mind Graphics 2 dock I used in this review go for $1,099 and $1,349 on Amazon, so the total cost of the hardware used for the review would be $4,747 US. If you need a portable and powerful 3D scanning workstation, the combination of the Creality Sermoon S1, Khadas Mind 2 mini PC, and Mind Graphics 2 dock offers a neat solution.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.