Week 7: Scan and Print

Suppose you have a cube of cheese that is further subdivided into 27 smaller cubes of cheese (in a 3x3 grid). Also suppose that a mouse begins eating his way through this 3D grid of cheese by entering one of the external faces of one of the 26 accessible sub-cubes. Finally, suppose that this mouse, once having eaten his way to the center of a sub-cube, never passes straight through, but always turns 90 degrees in some direction. How many sub-cubes of cheese can he pass through before entering the same sub-cube twice, or exiting the entire cheese lattice?

I tried to scan a paper airplane!

I stuck a paper airplane into the scanner in the CBA shop. In order to capture all the angles, I set the increpent to 30 degrees. This resulted in 12 scans, which was a real pain to merge.

I followed all the steps in the documentation to manually align each scan, and then use a global merge to generate a single point cloud. Then I manually cleaned up that point cloud, decimated it, and turned it into a decent mesh.

Then I Tried to Fill Holes

I Forgot to Save!! Hooray!!

It turns out that Geomagic likes to crash when you fill the holes of a really complicated mesh. Make sure you save your files before you try this step.

I Got Really Upset

Out of frustration, I decided to scan my own face. I had heard that other people had trouble with this, so I didn't think it would work.

It turns out that the depth of the scanner is actually really shallow. It's hard to get all of the important detail in the few shallow inches where it can read. I found that the depth you give the scanner is really pretty accurate to what it scans.

Finally, the most important part is the brightness of the laser. Oddly enough, I found that the lower the power, the better it worked! If the laser was turned up high, it missed all dark surfaces and small details. But with the brightness on 10%, it did a fairly good job.

I Made Sure to Save This Time