Dave advises:
"I used the 3D scanner and color 3D printer yesterday. It ended
up working pretty well. John and I discovered a couple of things
while using the Scanner. We tried taking a bunch of scans of my
object (20 degrees rotation between each scan for a total of 18
scans). When we tried to merge all these scans though the
resulting 3D model had a lot of large holes in it. We weren't
sure exactly why this was happening but the merge worked better when we
used fewer scans. It
seems that a general guideline might be to
use the minimum number of scans necessary for a full merge (maybe 60
degrees rotation between scans).
Also, the proper export file
type from the 3D scanner for full color texture map is VRML Type 2
(.wrl). VRML Type 1 does the geometry ok but you lose the
color
detail (the whole thing came out purple)."
Jamie adds:
"- Don't take too many scans. 4
scans, 90 degrees apart is probably good.
- When all your scans are aligned, don't
do the "merge points" command as I did. This grabs the data
from all the scans, puts it in one node, and removes your ability to go
back and adjust the individual pieces later.
- SAVE often. the program
crashed on me a few times.
A lot of these things you'll find out. It takes a significant amount of
time to get a scan done, cleaned, and ready for printing. I spent 4
hours today, and have to go back and do it again because I did that
merge points thing (from which I was unable to produce a clean
polygon)."
You can export many 3D file types:
The Vivid 910 can "digitize variable volumes (between 110x80x40
mm and 1200x900x750mm)", it scans up to 24 bit colour texture map too.
Place your object on the turn table (fixturing a cat is a whole course in itself). You can experiment with recalibrating the z depth using a slot in corner piece if you want, but this should be pretty good anyway.
Then move around your object and add lights to get best surface illumination. This will effect the colour intensity in your object texture map.
Open geomagic studio's raindrop software. Then click show
image window.
You can update range and colour to see how well the scanner is seeing
you object. In this mode, the screen on right is range/depth.
Your image (and background noise) will be dependent in part on your lighting, the objects colour and its reflectivity.
You can set up a multiple shots function and set the angle of rotation between images.
Clicking scan will produce the first scan. Click the next button to progress through your automatic rotation steps.
Once you are happy with your scans, click ok will save them. You can return, and add further images later to supplement any holes if you wish.
In the scan list in the panel on the left hand side of your screen you can select various scans to manipulate. Pressing alt 1 allows you to see just one scan, rather than all scans layered together.
Your next task is to remove noise and spurious scan points. Clever
rotation of the scan should let you clearly see much of the noise.
Pressing the right button and shift will zoom in (these hot keys
are all documented in the info bar at the bottom of the screen for each
tool). Drag a box to highlight unwanted points, they are selected when
they are red. Delete them. There is a lasso and an eraser paint brush
tool. Handy. You can, right click > clear all to
deselect currently
selected points.
There is an option in one of the menu points > reduce noise,
which
might help with noisy images. Selecting a single scan, it is possible
to do uniform resampling to reduce points but still see features.
Once happy with the noise reduction for each scan, select
points >
merge to combine the points into a polygon shape (Jamie advises
against this as it prevents you from going back and editing your data
further). Use manual
registration by picking a fixed scan as a reference point, and floating
scan to match to it. Choose 3 point registration, and mark the
corresponding points as John demonstrated.
You can select a fill holes option to try and fill in missing areas.
Save before filling holes, as the program is prone to crashing at this
point. Another tool is polygons > section by plane,
which can be
used to delete all points below a plane and optionally close off the
gap.
Depending on how the model looks, you may want to return to the object, flip it over and scan base and top, or supplement further angles. Heed Dave's notes above till the problem seems fixed. To add more scans click the minolta button.
Right click on the merged object in the list of scans to save it. The vrml2 file format seems to works best for colour mapping, to import into the z-corp printer. You can also save as an stl file for no colour. To modify colour and texture map you will need a third party program (blender?), although John says this may be possible in this software too.
You can open up z-print software and check that the file imports correctly, as this software is installed on the computer too. Finally transfer files to 863 folder to pass it to the computer used to run the z-corp printer.