The Creality Ferret Pro is a 3D scanner that can convert real world objects into 3D models that you can 3D print, use in gaming and virtual environments or reverse engineer to create custom parts.
They did cost thousands of pounds but prices have dropped considerably. This scanner can create detailed models with original colour information, both wired to your computer but also wirelessly with the included battery grip and wireless bridge. Creality also claims it can scan usually tricky black and metal objects without using any special spray.
I’ll show how to use the scanner, what it’s capable of, and I’ll put all Creality’s claims to the test with lots of examples, having scanned nearly everything I can find around the house and outside. All to help you decide if this is the right scanner for you. So let’s take a closer look.
Overview
The Ferret Pro comes nicely packaged with pretty much everything you need to get started, all in a convenient hard storage case. There’s the scanner itself, a battery grip, the wireless bridge, a smartphone holder, a small tripod and an adapter to use when you don’t want to use the battery grip. There’s also an initially confusing bundle of cables. I’ll cover what they’re all for shortly but they are all clearly labelled. And there’s some scanning markers. The only thing missing is a turntable which is useful for scanning smaller objects.
You can use the Ferret Pro both wired and wirelessly with a PC, Mac and many Android devices and only wirelessly with iPhones.
The simplest setup is wired directly to a PC or Mac using the supplied 2 metre long USB-A to USB-C cable. You need to make sure you connect this to a USB 3 port on your computer. You don’t need the battery grip for this setup – the USB port will power the scanner. Connect the scanner to the small tripod adapter and attach it to the included mini tripod or any other tripod with a standard ¼” mount.
There are thumbscrews to attach the USB-C cable more securely to the scanner, but the USB-C connection alone was generally secure enough for me.
You need to download Creality Scan software for your PC or Mac. At startup the software provides guidelines for achieving quality scans with some useful tips.
I’d recommend changing the default save folder for your scans and also giving the current project a name. Projects are automatically saved and it quickly gets confusing if you want to come back to a project later for reprocessing.
I’ll cover a few of the options in more detail when I discuss the scanner’s performance, but for this initial scan of a panda soft toy I set the object type as Normal, size as Small and feature type as Texture. Accuracy I set to high, colour mapping was enabled as was turntable mode which attempts to remove the turntable from the scan results.
Here I’m using a cheap Ikea lazy susan with the scanner on a tripod, which does make scanning an object like this easier but it’s not absolutely necessary – you could just move around the object. And the scanner does feature anti-shake tracking for handheld scans.
I did also try two electronic turntables – a cheap one off Amazon with just one speed which moves a little quickly, and my Edelkrone Headone which can be fully controlled wirelessly and slowed down to super slow speeds. I’d probably say the cheap one from Ikea was the best option overall.
When you click on New Scan you can move the scanner closer or further away guided by the software and the live preview to find the optimal distance. You want to see as much green as possible. Then you click on the start icon to commence scanning. Frustratingly there doesn’t appear to be any keyboard shortcuts. Particularly when you’re connected with a cable, it’d be far more convenient to just tap the spacebar to start and stop a scan.
Now slowly rotate the turntable or move around your object, to turn as much of the live preview to green. You’ll want to change the height and angle for a more complete scan. If the software loses tracking, try moving the camera to the current displayed captured preview and hold it for a few seconds for tracking to be re-established. When you’re done, click on stop and then follow the prompts to complete the scan. Then click on the One-Click Process to convert the capture to a 3D model that you can export for 3D printing for example.
The One-Click Process actually does three jobs with automatic settings. It creates an optimised so-called Point Cloud of all the measurements points of the scanned model. It then joins these points or vertices to create a triangular 3D mesh which you could send straight to your 3D printer or edit in additional software. And finally, if you left colour mapping enabled in the scan settings, it maps a full colour image onto your 3D scan. You can customise these settings, which I will cover further in the next section, but usually the default settings work fine. Although you will probably want to delete sections of the scan.
This can be done in the Point Cloud or Mesh. Since I’m 3D printing this first scan, I’ll remove these extra points in the Point Cloud so I don’t end up with any holes in the model. Click on the eye icon next to Point Cloud in the Multi-Project Board and shift-click and drag with the left mouse button around any sections you want to remove and click on the delete icon. You’ll need to move the camera angle around to do this. I’m removing some of the turntable and also the thin ribbon that will be difficult to print. You’ll need to manually click on Mesh and then Colour Mapping to re-process the scan with these removed points. You can see the results for this quick scan are very impressive.
If you have left colour enabled you’ll notice you can only export an OBJ file with this colour information. Most 3D printer slicing software will accept OBJ files, but if you want a more common STL file, click on the little eye icon next to Mesh in the Multi-Project board before you export to see only the resulting mesh.
This also provides a better indication of the accuracy of the scan – the colour map does make the results look a little more impressive than they actually are. You’ll also get access to the PLY format.
I’m 3D printing the panda using the Creality K1 Max I reviewed recently and their Creality Print slicer. Open the slicer, import the STL file and resize it using scale. Then use the Place on Face feature to rotate the scan’s bottom onto the printer’s base. I’m using the Move command to lower the scan into the base plate to cut off the uneven base of the model.
I chose a high quality print which took a few hours, but the scanning only took around 5 minutes and the processing including manually removing the extra points took less than 10 minutes.
I used automatic supports for the print which were a little tricky to remove, but I think most people would be pretty pleased with the result which required limited knowledge to create.
If you don’t want to be tethered to your computer, you can use the battery grip and your smartphone with the supplied smartphone holder. This screws into the battery grip and fits even larger phones with their cases. It opens to over 90mm.
With modern Android phones you can use the supplied y-cable. The USB-A end goes into the battery grip, and the two USB-C ends plug into your phone and the scanner.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work with my iPhone 15 Pro Max even though it does have USB-C, so you’ll need to use the supplied wireless bridge which has WiFi 6 support for faster transfers. You can also use this wireless bridge to connect to your PC or Mac wirelessly, and Android phones that don’t support a wired connection.
The wireless bridge also screws into the battery grip, behind the smartphone holder. Use the short USB-A to USB-C cable from the battery grip to the wireless bridge, and the longer USB-A to USB-C cable from the bridge to the scanner. When the wireless icon on the bridge turns blue, connect your smartphone, or wireless computer to its created WiFi network which starts with Ferret. Open Creality Scan, in this case on my iPhone and check for the green link icon next to New Scan to confirm the wireless connection is active. Do make sure you accept any local network and camera permission prompts otherwise the link icon won’t turn green. If you somehow dismissed these prompts like I did, on an iPhone go into Settings | Creality Scan, and enable them.
Just like the desktop app, you can configure settings and then tap on New Scan to commence scanning.
It works very similarly to the desktop app, but for outside, face and body scans and moving around larger objects, it’s far more convenient being untethered.
After you scan an object on your smartphone, you have the option to process it on the phone too. But if you cancel out before processing finishes, the scan will be saved but you can’t then finish off processing the file.
I prefer to process scans off my iPhone on the desktop app anyway and fortunately Creality makes it easy to transfer scans off your phone to a computer.
Tap on the Share icon, then Export to Computer. On the computer, click on Import from Phone and scan the QR code with your phone. My desktop computer and Macbook Pro both have WiFi 6 and transfers are pretty fast.
Performance
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The scanner is not much larger than a webcam – around 12cm wide. It has what looks like 4 lenses. The middle lens is in fact the infrared emitter, and the two lenses furthest apart are the infrared receivers. The lens next to the middle infrared emitter is a standard visible light camera for the colour mapping information and to detect markers which I’ll discuss shortly. With the camera plugged into a computer with the USB cable, you could use this as a web camera if you wanted.
When you scan an object, the infrared emitter pulses hundreds of measurement points, which you can see with this infrared security camera. As you move the scanner around an object, the two infrared receivers measure reflections off the object from these pulses at up to 30fps, to build up a 3D Point Cloud of the object. This works in a similar fashion to Face ID on your smartphone.
One important consideration when choosing a 3D scanner is the size of objects you want to scan. For an infrared scanner like the Ferret Pro, this is mainly dependent on the distance between the infrared receivers and therefore its field of view. The Ferret Pro is meant to be used for scanning medium sized objects, from 150mm up to 2000mm but I did try some smaller and larger objects too to test its limitations.
I’ve scanned pretty much anything I could find around the house and outside to test the performance of the scanner. I used it wired directly to my desktop PC and wirelessly with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, a MacBook Pro and my desktop PC again but this time over WiFi 6. The wireless connection worked very well for me.
One of the easiest things to try scanning is a face. Select Object type as Face, Feature as Geometry and Hi-Quality. You need to try and keep still but you can get decent results even scanning your own face. I did various scans in different lighting conditions. You don’t want it too dark indoors, or too bright outdoors, but lighting was actually less important than I thought it’d be.
I have dark hair which it does struggle with resulting in lots of holes in the scan so I tried using a dry shampoo.
This matte white spray is a cheap alternative to the expensive 3D scanning specific spray and does greatly improve your scans even if it does make you look 10 years older!
I got my son to scan me – and he got the hang of using the scanner on his first attempt.
It’s far from perfect, but the final model looks pretty good.
You can use the editing tools in Point Cloud to clean up the model as before and then if you switch to manual settings you can try and add more detail to the model by lowering the resolution to 0.3mm. If you want a smoother mesh with less detail, Creality recommends 0.5mm resolution. If you want to 3D print the model, under Mesh tick Fill Holes and Closed.
Next I tried a full body scan of my daughter. I scanned her outside on an overcast day, with the battery grip, my iPhone and the wireless bridge. For a full body scan Creality recommends Object Type as Body, Feature as Geometry and Accuracy as Fast. She tied her hair back and crossed her arms. I should have also got her to put on a less baggy top. Scanning her probably took 3 or 4 minutes.
I imported this fairly substantial model into Creality Scan on my desktop computer. The total file size is around 570MB and took around 35 seconds to transfer via the Import from Phone. This is a powerful computer with an Intel i9 12900K processor with 64GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card. One-Click process took 3 minutes and 17 seconds to complete. Just as a comparison this exact same file was actually faster to process on my MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro processor and 18GB of RAM which took just 2 minutes and 32 seconds.
I also did the same test on an 10 year old Intel i5 computer with 8GB RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 SUPER. This took over 10 minutes to process – so if you don’t have a powerful computer you may have to wait a long time for your scans to process – especially complex scans like this with plenty of frames.
This 3D scan would need a fair bit of clean-up, but it’s not bad considering my daughter did move a little while I was scanning her and it was one of my early scans.
Next up I had a proper use case for the scanner. I wanted to create a rear light mount for my gravel bike saddle that I could 3D print. I had to spray the saddle with some dry shampoo but got a decent scan.
I exported the model as an OBJ file with colour information – but that’s not really necessary. Unfortunately Creality Scan doesn’t have any tools for orienting your model in 3D space. It’s quite tricky doing this in software like Fusion 360 that I like to use, so I import the scan into Prusa Slicer, click on
Place on Face and then use the rotate tool and the various view angles to align the model as best I can. Then use Export Plate as STL/OBJ before importing into Fusion 360. I’d love to see Creality Scan add the ability to orient models in 3D space.
In Fusion 360 you can check the accuracy of the scan. The Measure tool gives just under 50mm across the rails as they go into the clamp. Measuring the saddle itself with my digital callipers I measured a fraction over 50mm so the scan is accurate to around 1% which is pretty good.
I won’t go into detail here, but it’s not easy to effectively reverse engineer 3D scans to create geometry that you can then model off. In this case I can create Mesh Section Sketches and then Loft between them. But arguably it’d probably be faster just using my callipers and modelling something from scratch. I’ll update the written article if and when I finish off this mount.
Creality Scan has a slightly hidden feature where you can scan an object from multiple angles and then merge the Point Clouds into one complete scan. Here I’m scanning a running shoe on a turntable. I’m using Texture as the Feature Type.
Scan the trainer from the first angle and then adjust the angle – in this case I’m turning it on its side.
Under the Multi Project Board click on New Project and start a new scan. You can add further scans but in this case two should be enough. Optimise both scans with default settings and delete any bits you don’t want in the final scans. Then click on Point Cloud Merging, click on the multiple projects and then Start. The two scans will be automatically aligned. If not you can go into Manual mode and choose common points on both scans. Exit this window and carry on processing the file. Click on Mesh and then Colour Mapping.
The resulting scan is pretty impressive for around 5 minutes of work. The black sole of the trainer looks good without any scanning spray. You can also try manually increasing the exposure in the IR preview windows to pick out further detail in the shadows.
These AirPods Pros are smaller than the recommended minimum 15cm. Creality recommends adding markers applied only to the table or turntable, and using either Texture Mode which supports markers or Marker mode. After a few attempts I got passable results but I’m not sure I’d use the Ferret Pro for scanning small items.
At the other end of the spectrum I tried scanning my VW Transporter van. Creality recommends adding markers and using Marker mode to scan vehicles. The scanner needs something to latch onto with the large featureless areas of a car. They supply some markers but they recommend using 150 just to scan the front of a car. And these markers appear to be fairly expensive and hard to come by.
I tried just scanning around the front of the car without any markers to see what it could pick up. It didn’t do a bad job around the wheels and wheel arches and the front grill to a degree. But you’d definitely need markers over the bonnet. I did have a plan to scan the inside of the car around the steering wheel to design a drinks holder, but I didn’t get great results in my few attempts.
Conclusions
The Creality Ferret Pro was a lot better than I was expecting and far better than I’ve got using my smartphone and various apps. It does depend a lot on what you are scanning, but you can generally get pretty good results with very little effort. The software is easy to use, and Creality provides genuinely useful documentation on how to get the best out of the scanner.
I would highly recommend reading through their tutorials and tailoring their suggestions to what you’re trying to scan.
You do need to experiment with your scan settings, and the distance you hold the scanner. It’s obvious with some objects whether to use Geometry or Texture mode, like for example the cereal box above, but other objects like the sander below, even though there’s plenty of geometry, Texture mode might actually work better.
The software has most of the features you probably need.
I like being able to do basic edits on both the Point Cloud and Mesh, and being able to align multiple scans is brilliant and works very well. I’d like to see perhaps a smoothing brush for the mesh.
Currently you’d need to take the scan into something like Meshmixer to directly edit it.
I’d also like the ability to align scans in 3D space. My main interest in a 3D scanner is to design 3D parts which I can then 3D print. This involves some reverse engineering that’s much easier with the scan aligned to the X, Y, Z axes of 3D space.
And it’s worth remembering you do need a fairly powerful computer to process these scans, and you need a fairly modern and capable smartphone if you want to scan wirelessly. Creality Scan doesn’t run on an older Android phone I have, but I got decent results with an older iPhone 11 and iPhone SE 2nd generation.
Although this is a budget scanner, it’s still quite expensive. So you do need to think carefully about what you’re actually going to use the scanner for. The Ferret Pro and the included software is mostly geared towards scanning medium sized objects to then 3D print. And as I showed in my first example, it works pretty well for this. For these medium sized scans it is accurate enough for some reverse engineering. The scale was accurate to between 1 and 2% and it was able to resolve detail down to around 1mm. Not quite the 0.1mm Creality claim, but still pretty good.
If you want to save a bit of money, there is the non Pro model without the wireless bridge. It’s convenient scanning without being tethered, but if you’re scanning close to your computer you may not need the wireless bridge.
I’ll be comparing this scanner to other 3D scanners very soon, so make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel if you’re interested in that.
Don’t forget to take a look at my YouTube video at the top of the page, and subscribe to my YouTube channel where I’m releasing videos every week on the latest technology and how to get the most out of it. If you tap the bell icon when you subscribe you’ll get a notification as soon as I release a video, and there’ll be a link to my site here for the written article. YouTube is also the best place to leave a comment. I read all of them and respond to as many as I can!
Buy direct from Creality:
Creality Ferret Pro: https://shrsl.com/4ff78
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