week 6: 3D scanning and printing

For this week we had to scan a 3D object and print in 3D.

 

 

Toki Doki's Cactus Girl (by Simone Legno)

Cactus

 

 

3D Scanning

For the scanning part of the assignment I would have liked to scan and print a Toki Doki's Cactus Girl figure, but since mine is back home I decided to build my own beginning from a real cactus. This would help me test the real capabilities of the machine. So I went out and bought the strangest cactus I found.

Resulting mesh

Resulting mesh

This cactus turned out to be too challenging for the 3D scanner and the thorns did not let the laser scan the surface so the result was a mesh with lots of holes on it. This scan took 2 hours and a half. I tried to repair the mesh on Meshlab software, but there were too many holes so I decided to have a much more radical approach and cut the needles. Then I scanned it again and it was much better. The scanner still was unable to scan some acute angles in the surface and the short part of the needles still left a mess on the mesh, but this scan only took one hour and I was able to repair the mesh using Rhino.

Debugging Nature

Cactus without needles

Original Mesh

Original Mesh

Repaired mesh

Repaired mesh

 

3D Printing

Since the cactus mesh still needed a lot of repairing I decided to print something different, but not completely different. As this week I was looking into all this spiky things and one other of my image obsessions is Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair I decided to combine both and create the Cactus ball chair.

Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair

Cactus - Ball Chair

I modeled it, but then I decided I would rather print something that would test some of the special powers of the 3D printing. So I created a simple kind of spheres "matryoshka" that could show how objects can be printed inside one another without the possibility of taking them out.
 

Matryoshka

Sphere-oshka
 
 

 

Structured Light 3D Scan

I also attended a session of the Structured Light Scanning with David Lakatos, which was awesome. Basically they take 3 pictures with the projection of stripes which are moved 3 centimeters vertically between each take, and then through Processing they turn it into a 3D image made out of dots, kind of what was used in the Radiohead's House of Cards video where Aaron Koblin was Director of Technology.
 

Previous pictures

Structured light Scanning