Protoceratops at the ROM by clothbot

Several months ago I had posted about a free website service called “My3DScanner.com“.  Basically, it lets you upload a number of photographs which their service turns into a cloud point which can then be converted into an STL for printing.¹

Clothbot has been playing with a similar service called Hypr3D.com.  Once you’ve uploaded photographs of the subject from different angles and Hypr3D has worked their magic, you can download a digital copy of your subject as a point cloud, STL, or 3D model in several formats.  A feature I really like is the in-browser 3D model viewer.

Such services don’t (yet) perfectly create meshes, so you may need to brush up on your MeshLab skillz, but they certainly take a lot of work out of the process and it is definitely more convenient to carry your smart-phone-camera rather than a 3D scanner.

1. Tony Buser provides a summary of his toolpath for doing this here.

Here’s something a bit different: a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic features prominently in Adri Schokker’s installation “Reconstruction of a Catastrophe.”  As you can see in this video, the the Thing-O-Matic is used in conjunction with a novel video interface to create human figures for the installation.

The piece deals with the human connection to disastrous events; it uses the MakerBot-created items to actually place the viewer in the recreated scene.  The piece is not graphic, but the relationship it creates to the piece is an uncomfortable one for the viewer; it’s a bit darker than most of the projects we share here, so use your judgment before showing it to younger people.  That said, this is an innovative and thoughtful piece of art; we’re glad that a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic helped in its creation.

The awesome folks over at blablabLAB just took their show on the road to Romania, where they continued their “Be Your Own Souvenir” project, this time printing the scans on their brand-new Thing-O-Matics!

Check out the video about their project here.

They sent along a few pictures, and I’m struck by the fact that this looks like a very fun event.  More photos after the jump!

Yes, obviously these guys are pretty rad, as clearly evidenced by their neat transportation setup for their new, blacked-out bots with 24″ rims.  OK, not the bit about the rims.

Some early attendees getting scanned before a rapt audience.

And then the prints.  This is a very neat project and we are very pleased that Blablab is out there using the Thing-O-Matic in this project.  If you’re a new fan, keep watching http://byos.blablablab.org/ for updates including an upcoming code release.

Gnome and Gnome

There is no doubt Tony Buser has definitely done more for the 3D printing community than anyone else when it comes to advancing gnome duplication and teleportation technology.  However, I’m convinced that his SpinScan open source software and hadware has a larger potential besides assisting in the controversial practice of gnome cloning. ¹  Tony hasn’t finalized the materials list, but the final project would probably involve a decent web camera with good low light performance² , a cheap laser³ , a stepper driver, a stepper motor, an arduino, a few bearings, threaded rod, and some nuts and bolts.  The whole lot would set you back around $200 and significantly less if you can scavenge a few parts.

So, if you could scan and print anything, what would it be?⁴

Spinscan by tbuser

Gnome Scan #3 by tbuser

This one came out pretty well and is the most complete 360 degree gnome scan yet. It was also the first scan using my new printed turntable and spinscan software from thingiverse.com/thing:9972 Spinscan isn't calculating the Z axis correctly, so if you download the point cloud you'll see it was stretched. I had to shrink the Z axis in blender. Other then that and 2 steps in meshlab, it required no cleanup or merging of multiple point clouds, spinscan got a complete scan of all sides in one go.

This thing brought to you by

1. I mean, the anti-gnome-stem-cell lobby is just insane!
2. Perhaps around $100
3. He got a $4 laser from eBay
4. But, perhaps a better question is…  what are you waiting for?!

SIGGRAPH 2011 - Portable, super-high-resolution 3-D imaging from MIT

It used to be that creating highly detailed microscopic scans required huge expensive pieces of equipment, vibration isolation tables and hours of processing.  Researchers at MIT have developd a cheap small and portable 3D scanner about the size of a soda can that can detect features as small as 0.0001 mm tall and 0.0002 mm wide – and it can create the 3D images nearly instantaneously.

I cannot wait to plug one of these into my Thing-O-Matic!

Hattip to SlashDo

80 mm tall scan, printed with a Thing-O-Matic

I’ve been working with 3d scanning for over two years now, building my own 3d scanners and writing code to work with commercial scanners like the Kinect. When I started my artist residency at MakerBot, I knew I had to combine 3d scanning and 3d printing. One of the first ideas we had was to set up a 3d photo booth at MakerBot to scan visitors. So I wrote an app called KinectToStl which first launched at the MakerBot NY user group. I modified it a bit based on feedback from that event, and it’s since been fired up for the 3rd Ward Make-A-Thon and Maker Faire Bay Area 2011. Other artists and hackers are exploring the app, like 4nchor5 la6.

I’ve been maintaining a GitHub repository of all the code I write while at MakerBot, and the source is available for download there. If you don’t want to deal with compiling it, there’s also an OSX app available. The project has a few external dependencies that make it slightly difficult to compile right now, primarily because openFrameworks is nearing a release and hasn’t stabilized yet. The source would be most useful for someone interested in recreating this in Processing or another environment.

Once you’ve downloaded the app, plug in your Kinect and start the app, you’ll see three tabs and four sliders.

Screenshot from KinectToStl

The first tab is where the relevant options are:

• zCutoff controls how far away your cutoff plane is, in centimeters. Anything farther than this will disappear into the “background” (flat area).
• fovWidth and fovHeight control the field of view (or angle of view) multiplier in each axis. This acts like a “zoom” function, and lets you zoom into the center of the scan.
• stlSize controls the width of the STL file, in millimeters. I generally stick between 60 and 80 mm.
• useRandomExport is an experimental export option that only works when fovWidth and fovHeight are set to 1. It will attempt to do a more natural triangulation of the model.

Once you’ve framed the subject and have your settings right, click on “exportStl”. This will save an STL file to the /data folder next to the .app. They’re named like screenshots, “Kinect Export 2011-05-25 at 18.21.13.stl” These files are ready to be 3D printed. They’re scaled properly, and sitting flat on the bed. Because they have a high triangle count, they can take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to run through Skeinforge.

The second tab (click in the the second rectangle) is for lighting options if you’re having trouble seeing the live preview. The third tab is for more advanced options. I’ll mention a few:

• temporalBlur is what causes the 3d model to fade over time, and helps with the accuracy of the scan. It’s like the “exposure time” setting on a camera: shorter exposure is noisier, longer is more sensitive to motion but less noisy.
• smoothingAmount controls the level of blurring on the model. This can make a visually more appealing or better skeined model at the expense of loss of detail.
• backOffset controls the size of the backing plane. If you want more layers of backing, turn this up.

I’ve found that the best parameters for printing these models are with 3-4 shells and almost 0 infill. They’ll print quickly like this, and should be fairly structurally sound.

I also recommend playing with the “OSX Kinect Application” posted by CidVilas to Thingiverse, it has a lot more options and a prettier interface.

If you’re interested in scanning an object in a more complete way, I recommend taking multiple STL exports from KinectToStl and doing boolean joins on them after cutting off the backing plane with an intersection operator. If someone tries this out, I’d love to see the results!

All the scans we (myself and MakerBot) have been taking with this app are being posted to the 3dphotobooth Thingiverse account. So if you’ve been to any of the recent events mentioned above, check it out!

Get scanned by MakerBot Artist-in-Residence Kyle McDonald at the 3rd Ward MakerBot Make-A-Thon

MakerBot User Group New York – it’s time to meetup!

The 3rd Ward MakerBot Make-A-Thon is your chance to meet other MakerBot users, print awesome 3D objects and even a 3D portrait of yourself.

MakerBot Artist-in-Residence Kyle McDonald will be presenting his work turning the Xbox Kinect into a 3D Scanner. He will scan you in his 3D Photo Booth, then print you using the MakerBot.

Learn more about Kyle McDonald’s Xbox Kinect hack in this 3rd Ward blog post.

Bring your MakerBots and your favorite objects for a MakerBot user show and tell.

Giveaways! There will be giveaways, including LEDs!

MakerBot User Group New York

Gnome Clone

Veteran MakerBot operator Tony Buser has been uploading some pretty cool 3D objects to Thingiverse lately.  The interesting thing about them is that he made them by using My3DScanner.com, a new (free!) online service for converting 2D digital photographs into 3D point clouds.  From there you can use Meshlab to convert the point cloud into an STL.

First in Meshlab I load the point cloud, delete the points I don’t want, then goto Filters -> Point Set -> Compute normals for point sets, then Filters -> Point Set -> Surface Reconstruction: Poisson (set octree depth to about 9 or 10), then export to STL.

Then import the STL into Blender, chop off parts I don’t want, maybe fill some holes, re-align it so it sits on the platform right, add a cube and do a boolean difference to give it a flat bottom, sometimes I also use Blender to flip some normals that are backwards.

Then I load it into Pleasant 3D and resize it and/or center or reorient it some more.

Using My3DScanner Tony uploaded 30 pictures from his camera phone to create the above gnome clone.  Awesome!

Who is going to be the first person to create a 3D image of Mount Rushmore using this system?