MakerBot Industries

I’ve been wanting to mess around with David Scanner for a while but it only runs on windows and I’m hardly ever around a Windows machine. Since it’s the weekend, I was able to hijack Marisol’s computer and give it a go.

I went to the corner store and bought a model of a knight’s helmet to scan. The helmet was silver and we just happen to have spray chalk, so I sprayed it down with the chalk and that made it nice and matt and perfect for scanning. Reflective things are bad for scanning because they reflect the laser line. Spray chalk is great, but I had to do some touch ups because it rubs off very easily.

I acquired a laser level and a webcam and then began the setup. There is some preparation involved. You have to assemble a model of a backdrop and then get all the pieces in place and go through a set up calibration process. Once I did all that, which took a few hours of reading the manual and getting everything adjusted, I swept the laser line over the model and it makes a point cloud.

I saved an stl file and even though I was using a super high resolution webcam (720×1240) it downconverted it to 320×240 because I don’t have a license. I made three different scans, one from the front and one from each side and then spent about 2 hours learning how to mesh them together in the David Scanner software only to find out when I went to save that this is an option that only works if you have a license. It’s clear in the documentation that this isn’t a free feature, but I wish I had a heads up before I spent all the time meshing the stls together.

In steps Meshlab to the rescue. It’s an open source program that does joins meshes! With Meshlab I was able to take my low resolution stl files and put them together and then do a poisson thing that brings them all together into one mesh. I ended up with an stl model that looked like a very low resolution copy of the knights helmet.