I instantly thought of jingle bells for something that can not be made subtractively since it requires a ball inside an outer shell. I got some images of jingle bells and decided to model one for myself. I modeled it in Rhinos and modified/polished it in Maya (free student version).

Useful operations to keep in mind were Boolean methods (difference, intersection and union) when creating the fissure in the outer shell of the bells.

The image above is the modeled I designed. It is a sphere with radius of ~1.5cm. The sphere inside is about 1/3 the side of the outer shell. In order to make them as one mesh (for 3D printing), I created a very thin linking piece at the bottom that I would remove once the 3D printing is done. Currently, it is in the 3D printer (images to be uploaded soon after printing).

 

I used my friend's MIT duck doll for scanning. It was quite small (about the sizse of palm of the hand) and was going to be not too easy to scan because of the fur and dynamic shapes of the body. I used the smaller scannining machine (designed for quick scanning jobs) and gave 7 divisions to collect 3D data from the doll.

Above is the point cloud data mapped in 3D in Scan Studio HD.

I was particularly impressed with the captured textures for the 3D model. The surface covered with fur had lots of noise whereas the MIT sweater resembled a real texture of a sweater. The color was very close to the actual model as well, which I thought was beautiful.

Some useful settings to remember inj Scan Studio HD are:
* Make sure to leave 7" distance between the camera and the object for Macro mode
* Center the pedastool (both x,y direction)
* Normally 5-7 divisions are enough to capture reasonably complicated objects.

I imported the point cloud data (.ply) into MeshLab and created a complete 3D mesh out of it.

MeshLab was a very useful software in that it was very quick to apply different meshing and polishing techniques but one problem it crashed too often. Therefore, saving often was very important.

Creating a mesh from point cloud (or from a rough mesh with lots of holes) in MeshLab:
* In MeshLab, go to Filters -> Point Set -> Surface Reconstruction: Poisson
* Give parameter values of: Octree Depth=6, everything else as default
* In order to fill holes, go to Filters -> Remeshing, Simplification and Reconstruction -> Close Holes
** If you get warning saying "Non Manifold Vertices" then go to Filters -> Selection -> Select non Manifold Vertices
** Delete selected non Manifold Vertices and try Close Holes operation again

WEEK 4: 3D SCANNING & PRINTING

Part1: 3D Modeling & Printing

Scanning Objects