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

Untitled by tbuser

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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?! [↩]

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?