To circumvent the problems induced by nonlinear gamma of the commercial video projector, we recently developed a flexible method for 3‐D shape measurement that generates sinusoidal fringe patterns for 3‐D shape measurement by defocusing binary structured patterns. However, it can only measure “smooth” objects. In this paper, we propose a technique to generalize this technique for arbitrary step height measurement. In particular, the binary coding method is combined with this technique for point‐by‐point phase unwrapping. Experiments have verified the success of the proposed approach.