3D Scanning and Printing
//MAS 863.09 How to Build (almost) Anything
//Boris Kizelshteyn


For this week's assignment I 3D scanned and printed a pineapple, here are the results:

I used the Minolta Phase Modulating 3D Scanner and Geomagic studio to do the scanning. Because the pineapple is not a symetric body, I needed to register scanned slices manually which was pretty straighforard in Geomagic. I then needed to take the model out of Geomagic as an STL and make it watertight and ready for priting with Rhinosorcous 4.0. While the final 3D print was not so great, I did learn some neat Rhinocerous 4.0 tricks that will be very useful in the future.

Firstly, for the next year one can sign up to be a beta tester of Rhino 4.0 on the mac free of charge, more info here: http://community.irhino3d.com/

Now, to clean up the model, I brought it into rhino and:
1. Draped points (Drapept) on both sides of the model
2. Made a Mesh from the points (MeshFromPoints)
3. Filled the holes, 1st automatically (FillHoles) then individually (FillHole).
4. Then I needed to give my pineapple a thickness, this is key if you are printing. To do this I offset the mesh (SetMeshOffset) by 2. This was the units my model was in, which were mm.
5. No before I could print, I had to seperate the leaves of the pineapple from the body so I could seal the body. I did this by intersecting the body with another plane and then doing a MEsh Boolean Split and then a Mesh Boolean Union after I sealed up the base of the pineapple. At printing time, thepineapple still had a huge hole and the leaves came apart from the body, but it was still good practice.


Here is my my stl file: boris.stl

Because I was the 3D scanning guru I also tried the digitizer and the structured light scanner. I found the former impossible to use, I would guess a great deal of practice would be required, while the latter was not available for long enough for me to be able to do the tutorial and run a scan.

Here is a terrible hand trace we produced with the hand scanner: hand.3dm
//Conclusion


All in all this was an interesting week. I enjoyed getting more proficient at using Rhinoserous and getting experience with 3D Printing. The pineapple was a challenging subject, and the fact that printout came out at all was pretty remarkable. I was told by the shop managers that thickness of my body was pretty much as thin as is possible with the machines here.