I'm just going to share this tiny misc thing because if I don't I never will:

Tired of assuming that your scan area is a flat 3D rectangle? Now you can turn it into a *tilted* 3D rectangle! These pictures should explain:

Flat:

Tilted:

Note that I didn't actually generate any kind of new scan pattern... I just rotated the one I already had. It's amazing how useful sins and cosines are in real life! Thanks, statics! 

This does mean that your scan pattern is a bit ridiculous. 

Also pay no attention to the bottlecap propping up the thing being actively moved during the scan. 

But hey, it actually works! "works" as in this is an artificial scenario with a flat object and a defined amount of tilt. But if you want to scan a shape roughly like this, it is much better than taking a giant cuboid where your object is only in focus for a thin slice, which was your previous best option. 

No Tilt

30 degrees

I haven't seen enough examples of this to understand what/why might be different, but you might want to try spotting the differences by tabbing back and forth. 

I would really love to see a general solution for this, probably borrowed from CNC routing, where you can scan arbitrary shapes without crashing and wasting movement. Of course it's a bit of an oxymoron to have to scan your object/know its shape before you scan it, but you could at least save a lot of time by inputting a rough shape to begin with.