How the Artec Leo 3D Scanner is Helping Renovate Luxury Yachts

Sailing a luxury yacht around the world might sound like paradise. After taking to the ocean with a bottle of champagne, you could leave all your troubles behind. Except, perhaps, the troubles of docking fees, the risk of your engine packing in, and regular maintenance of your wooden decking after exposure to sun, rain, and seawater.

That last issue—taking proper care of wooden decking—is a major challenge for boat owners, even those who seem to be living out their wildest fantasies. Traditionally, decking is made from wood such as teak, which has a good level of water resistance due to its high levels of silica and oil. But even teak needs regular maintenance, and it’s very expensive to replace if any areas of the decking become critically damaged.

Fortunately, there is another option. North Carolina’s TT Custom Marine offers synthetic decking and flooring solutions that look as sleek as wood but without the maintenance requirements, making it plain sailing for budget-conscious mariners, whether they’re traveling the seven seas or just going fishing.

Revamping a Million-Dollar Boat

With more than two decades of experience installing synthetic decking on a range of vessels, TT Custom Marine is one of the best in the business. But every job is a major challenge, as dimensions vary from boat to boat. More than that, these are often very expensive yachts, closer in value to a large house than a land vehicle.

“When you’re playing around on people’s million-dollar boats, they want it to look right,” explains Travis Tea, President of TT Custom Marine. “The decking needs to fit well, and no boat is perfectly flat or square. For instance, maybe the floor curves up a little bit into a footrest, or the corners of the cockpit are angled to direct water. It’s always a challenge.”

So how does the Apex-based company account for those unpredictable curves and corners when installing new decking? For many years, the team used physical templates to measure customers’ boats, hand-drawing yacht outlines onto transparent mylar films that could then be used to cut the new flooring.

But this approach had its drawbacks, and the team struggled to meet demand when customers brought in a new or customized boat. Worse still, the mylar films kept in storage would start to degrade over time, making them unusable. A move to digital templating helped speed up measurement, but many of the issues remained.

Charting a New Course

A few years back, TT Custom Marine realized that 3D scanning would allow it to make customizable CAD models that would theoretically last forever without deteriorating, solving some of the challenges that physical templating had begun to present.

However, the company’s first entry-level scanner simply didn’t have the resolution to capture decking with the required level of detail. And there were other major issues: the device struggled to capture these large vessels in sunlight—hardly ideal when a boat was docked outside.

That’s where Digitize Designs came in to steady the ship. Knowing that he had to make the right investment in his next 3D scanner, Tea set up a demo with Bo Helmrich, one of our 3D Scanning Sales Engineers. The pair met at a local boatyard to see how the latest scanning equipment would fare on a docked vessel.

While Tea had a shortlist of three possible models, it didn’t take long for Helmrich to convince him that the Artec Leo, the world’s first fully standalone, AI-powered 3D scanner, was the right tool for the job.

“He was comparing it to another scanner at the time, and Leo was just so much faster and had much higher resolution,” recalls Helmrich. “I remember one time he said he’d scanned a 38-foot boat. The scan data was accurate to within a millimeter, and he was just amazed.”

Crucially, the Artec Leo was more than up for the challenge of working outdoors, even in the bright North Carolina sunshine. And its fully wireless operation made the process easier and safer—with workers often worried about falling into the water with their unwieldy previous 3D scanner.

“The real game-changer was that you can scan outside—you’re not strapped to a computer, and you know there’s no cabling for you to trip over,” says Tea. “Just seeing the results as you go and being able to see every little detail is amazing.”

Textures and Time Savings

The environmental flexibility of the Artec Leo has been a game-changer, but the massive upgrade in resolution has proven just as important. With the scanner deployed in HD Mode, TT Custom Marine can easily capture noise-free 3D models of yacht decking, complete with every tiny detail.

This feature has been invaluable when scanning boat cockpits, whose hardware can be installed in different configurations from boat to boat. The scanner can even capture subtle textures that the previous scanner was totally incapable of recognizing.

“Most boats have a non-skid pattern molded into the floor. It’s usually a little diamond pattern, about a millimeter to a millimeter and a half tall,” explains Tea. “When we first tried 3D scanning, we just didn’t have the resolution to pick that up. With Artec Leo, it picks up the fine details and color changes, so we can clearly see the differences.”

With a scan speed of up to 35 million points per second, the Leo can capture all this complex data quickly. An entire 45-foot boat can be captured in an hour—a process that would have taken three or four times longer using the old physical templating method.

Stitching all the data together has been a breeze, too. Where previously Tea and co. would use three different programs for mesh cleanup, texturing, and CAD modeling, they now use Artec Studio to automate large parts of the process.

“The whole process in Studio is so much easier,” says Tea. “To scan a 40 or 45-foot boat, you’re talking big datasets: 40, 50, 60 gigabytes. Artec Studio is able to manipulate those large files quite easily. It just crushes them.”

What’s on the Horizon for TT Custom Marine

TT Custom Marine sees the Artec Leo as a long-term investment. And the company plans to get plenty more use out of its handheld device, having already built up an extensive digital inventory of boats.

For starters, Tea and his team are looking at ways to reverse engineer legacy molds and make custom jigs for their boatbuilding partners. They’re also planning to scan certain assemblies that would have a universal fit for certain boat models.

Whatever the company does next with Tea’s “new favorite toy,” the Artec Leo has already more than demonstrated its value in the production of custom synthetic decking. “It’s kind of at a sweet spot right now where it’s working,” Tea says. “It’s great.”

Interested in how the Artec Leo and other 3D scanners can revolutionize your business? Don’t miss the boat—contact Digitize Designs today and set up a demo.