figure 1

figure 2

figure 3

figure 4

WEEK 7

3D Scanning and Printing was the task this week. First I tried scanning my hand, but I was unable to keep it still enough during the scanning process.  I thought that since my fingers were outstretched that this was the problem, but even in making a fist was not successful.  I then moved to my backup object which was a square MIT paperweight.  I was hoping that the laser was sensitive enough to pick up the groves in the MIT shield, but it was not. I think it is important to have pretty definite contours of the surface you are trying to scan.  Since I didn't have any other object ready, I started testing different things I found around the lab.  The first was a wrench and the second was a shoe.  The wrench came out decent after a lot of editing, but I didn't really like the way it looked and there were no great points to register it with.

The next object I tried (shown in figure 1) was a Lego piece from the cube.  The eyes and mouth outline were great to make sure that the different scans were aligned.  Figure 2 shows the Lego bug in the GeoMagic program. One thing I did notice while scanning was the shadow that was caused by shining the light on the Lego.  It's  even more obvious on the finished product. After a ton of editing, hole filling and line simplification (thanks John, again), I finally had something to work with. I worked with Stacey and we put our projects in the same Zcorp file and let them run at the same time.  We excavated our projects the next day and placed them in the wax machine shown in figure 3.  Lucy was kind enough to take a picture of all the projects, so I decided to use it.