Week 3: 3D printing & scanning

PART I | 3D Printer

  1. testing 3D printer characteristics (group work)

    As a group, we test printed on the Sindoh Printer in ACT shop.

    Most of the things worked besides the clearance for those moving elements on the bar. It is no longer movable after 0.5.

  2. designing for printing

    For my design, I created a penetrated sphere in Rhino, imagining it to be a rolling toy for my cat Mona.

    It has a diameter of 4cm, with 4mm diameter holes penetrating throughout.

  3. printing & bathing

    I sent the stl file to Tom (CBA shop) to print in batches.

    After being printed, the sphere was bathing in Sodium Hydroxide solution for a while.

    Then, I took it out from the bath, in order to clean the extra supports inside the sphere.

    Again, I put it back into the solution with ultrasonic for another hour.

    I let it dry for about an hour, and it is done!

PART II | 3D Scan

  1. demo

    During the demo session, we tried out two kinds of scanner.

    The first one is Artec Eva, a hand-held scanner where a person need to hold and aim the scanner at the object/person.

    The second one is NextEngine, a locked-in scanner where only smaller objects can be placed on to the spinning plate and get scanned.

  2. try to scan

    I used NextEngine scanner to scan my objects as they are both small.

    However, both of them failed due to the intricacy involved in their materials.

    The first one is a furry puffin keychain, which turned out to be pixelated and impossible to fuse.

    Then I tried with my shell. First horizontally laid on the plate, which made the top of the shell invisible to the scanner.

    To make it possible to scan 360, I found a piece of clay and stuck my shell vertically on the clay.

    But it is still not scanning very well, with lots of holes detected.

    The holes made it unable to fuse. So I go into edit and try to fill up the holes.

    This time the 'fuse' function was available, yet it still turned out to be too many meshed in the stl file.

    Eventually, I just documented all my attempts and fail to print from my scans.

    Lesson learned here is that 3D scanning does not like complicated texture on objects.