WEEK 4: 3D SCANNING AND PRINTING

This is a week for discovering the beauties and the not so beauties of 3D scanning and printing.

3D scanning with the Minolta

My first 3D scan: a slot car. And my first mistake: the focus distance was not right and the scanner thought the background was the scanned piece. After adjusting the distance, the scan looked like a car but not good enough for fixing and printing it.

With a little bit of professional help (John), we changed some of the settings (like doing 45º multishots instead of 90º) and got a scan that was good enough to try to fix. After filling the numerous holes (about 100), the car looked decent and I decided to print it out. In order to send the job to the Dimension 3D printer we had to get rid of the back fin of the car that did not appear well connected to the body.

The result (before and after melting the wax; the pliers did not work too well):

As a bonus, I scanned this typical Catalan Christmas figure:

3D scanning with the Next Engine:

Interestingly enough, I preferred the results with this cheaper scanner. It is probably not fair to compare, as the Nintendo controller seemed like the perfect light colored smooth surface to scan.

3D scanning with 123D Catch

I was really curious about using this tool, because it relies on a standard camera and free software. Also, my group is working on a project called CityScope, which is basically a city design lego platform synced to a virtual model. In order to map physical changes in the model, these need to be scanned and taken to the computer, where complex data simulation is executed before projecting back information into the legos. Photogrammetry is a very promising tool to quickly generate this information. PLUS, you could see how my 1^st week project proposal could be a great add on to automate the generation of the necessary pictures of the model. http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.13/people/Hasier/Week1.html

Check out the Kendall Square lego model and the scanned version of it.

3D digitizer

I was lucky to have Sam teach me how to use the 3D digitizer. Check a brief tutorial on how to get started: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.13/tutorials/DigitizerTutorial.html

3D printing

Time to 3D print a design. I used sketch up for the 3D design (I had to download a plugin to save the file as a stl for the printer).

Why a lego brick and an apartment? Do they have any connection?

My research are at the Media Lab is the CityHome. One of the main ideas of this housing model is the “home in a box” concept: designing transformable homes that are designed in the factory and are stuck together on site as if they were lego bricks.

This 3D part wants to visualize the idea by creating an apartment lego brick.

I decided to use the Makerbot this time. It may be useful for the future (even though it takes for ages!). Later, I realized this was not the most appropriate part to print in the makerbot, as I had to get rid manually of all the support material generated (which was abundant due to the characteristics of the design).