There’s a new post up at 3DPrinting@UMW, the blog about the MakerBotting adventures of a couple faculty members at University of Mary Washington in Virginia. I hope Tim won’t mind me nabbing his picture; this result from a Kinect scan is just too good.

The post says he sat in a spinning chair and turned slowly while the Kinect grabbed the image, and then used Christoph Heindl’s program ReconstructMe to turn the scan into a 3D mesh. The bust you see above was made on a TOM. Nice. It’s good enough for me to read the expression on Tim’s face, and I would bet he ruffled his shirt a bit to show how well the combination of Kinect, ReconstructMe, and a Thing-O-Matic could capture reality. Tim also gives fair credit to the pretty fantastic instructional video from our Tony Buser on how to clean up a model.

Also, I love this closing thought:

In many ways it feels like the advances being made in this field are so incredibly fast moving that it’s hard to keep up. The great thing is it feels closer to magic than reality, and how often do you get to say that about the work you do in higher education?

“Magic” seems to be a bit of a theme on this blog.

3D printing is one of the truly revolutionary things you can witness. I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While showing the devices to undergraduate art students in a sculpture class those words rang truer than ever as their eyes lit up in wonderment. The power to create objects in a virtual space, print them, and hold them in the physical is unbelievable.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of this group when they get their Replicator in the fall. Make on, UMW!

MakerBot something for the mothers in your life! (or at least send them this video).