A recently proposed flexible 3D shape measurement technique using a defocused projector [ Opt. Lett. 34, 3080 (2009) ] shows great potential because of its elimination of projector’s gamma calibration. However, it cannot handle step-height surfaces. I present here a technique to extend its measurement range to an arbitrary shape by integrating a binary coding method. A computational framework is also proposed to tackle the problems related to the defocusing.