Next Friday night, MakerBot will host a very special MUGNY (MakerBot User Group NYC) meeting at the beautiful Marymount School Fifth Avenue Campus right across from the Met Museum. Marymount is an an independent, Catholic all-girls day school that actually has a rocking fab lab full of MakerBots — so this is a special pleasure for us. What’s more, this venue allows us to host a special RSVP only (grab tickets quick here!) opportunity to do a walking tour through the Met Museum so that a number of the artists can share about their derivative works right in front of the originals!

At 6:30pm, MakerBot Operators, Thingiverse Makers, and the curious public will cross the street and join us at the Marymount School for refreshments, snacks, the latest community show-and-tell, and inspiring keynote talks featuring the Met MakerBot Hackathon and the Capture Your Town project that emerged: a chance for all of our community to dive in and digitize buildings, artwork, and other objects that they want to share with the world about where they live.

MakerBot User Group meetings are monthly meet ups for members of our world-wide community to get together locally to share what they have been up to with their MakerBots. The events typically include a featured guest or keynote arranged beforehand, and tend to attract a large crowd of those from the general public as well as those actively involved with MakerBot and Thingiverse — all are welcome!

Check back early next week for further details about the Hackathon artists, digital archivists, and MakerBot community members who will be speaking — and reserve your “5:00pm Pre-Event Demo and Art Talk at the Met Museum” and “MUGNY Event @ Marymount School” RSVP tickets so that you can receive instructions for attending this very special evening.

Thanks again to inspiring maker and educator Jaymes Dec for connecting us with the Marymount School.

The Thomas Jefferson statue from Monticello, scanned, 3D printed, reassembled, and painted bronze

Consider, for a moment, going to a museum and being told you could only see 2% of the collection.  Despite the incredible sprawling buildings devoted to showcasing the Smithsonian’s collection only this very small percentage of their 137,000,000 piece collection is available for viewing.  Now that the Smithsonian has contracted with a company to begin scanning their collection, more of those pieces tucked away in their archives will be available to the viewing public.

This is really such an exciting development.  While it would be very cool to be able to visit the Smithsonian online and examine digital scans of their collection, it would be so much more amazing to be able to download those 3D scans for printing out.  I can’t wait for the day kids can actually print complete dioramas, examine a physical copy of a feature of a statue, bring a life-size Allosaurus claw replica for show-and-tell, create a giant version of some tiny little sea creature, or a model showing the relative scales of a person and a woolly mammoth.

Museums of the near future could even use 3D scanning to augment their collections on display or traveling exhibits.  A few years ago I was fortunate enough to see the King Tut exhibit in Chicago.  The collection and presentations were amazing – but instead of King Tut himself we saw a life-sized projection of the tomb, the sarcophagus, the mummy, and his bones.  While this was interesting, it would have been more interesting still to have been able to view a life-sized replica created in the same way as the Monticello Jefferson statue.  Now that computing and internet access are nearly ubiquitous, you could even use a smartphone or tablet computer to better examine some feature of an exhibit while you were still inside the museum.¹

Thanks Slashdot!

1. What, were you expecting another post about Doctor Who or something? [↩]

Amy Buser Reconstructed

People have been using the Microsoft Kinect with 3D printing for a while now using excellent programs like Kyle McDonald’s KinectToStl.  However, until recently, most programs can only capture one side of an object which creates a kind of relief sculpture.  To get around this limitation, you could take multiple scans and manually merge them. (hard)  Others like the blablabLAB calibrates and positions multiple Kinect sensors around a scene. (expensive) Last year Microsoft demonstrated something called Kinect Fusion that allows you to carry the Kinect around and dynamically capture all angles of a scene in real time.  Unfortunately, they did not release any software.  Profactor has just released a beta version of free software called ReconstructMe that works a lot like Kinect Fusion.

I’ve scanned a number of things so far, check out the reconstructme tag on Thingiverse!  ReconstructMe works a lot like the Polhemus scanner we used to scan Stephen Colbert where you walk around and wave the Kinect across a scene to capture all sides.  Although the resolution is lower, at least you don’t have to dust your hair in corn starch!  As a matter of fact I’ve found the best way to scan a person is to have them sit in an office chair, point the Kinect at their head, and then slowly spin themselves in a circle.  Once you have a raw scan, I suggest using the free version of NetFabb Studio Basic to rotate it, Cut away the parts you don’t want, and then Repair it to make it solid and suitable for 3D printing on your MakerBot.  The Ponoko blog has an excellent video explaining the process.  You can also place objects on a turntable, like a lazy susan and spin it by hand.  Just make sure that anything ReconstructMe sees within it’s scanning area all rotates in the same way.

There are some limitations to ReconstructMe.  It is Windows only.  In order to do real time reconstruction, you need a fairly powerful video card as it does the calculations on the GPU.  There is an offline recording option that allows you to record on a slower computer and then process it later using a more powerful computer.  However, you don’t get the realtime feedback alerting you when you move too fast or go out of alignment.  Due to the low resolution of the Kinect camera, it’s not that great for scanning small things.  For that, you might want to try something like Spinscan.  However, for scanning large objects like people – it’s awesome!  So go download ReconstructMe and be sure to tag anything you make on Thingiverse with the reconstructme tag.

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Protoceratops at the ROM by clothbot

As I was typing up the last post I recalled Clothbot’s recent submission to Thingiverse.  While at the Royal Ontario Museum he took about 15 photos of a protoceratops fossilized skeleton on display.  Once home he passed the photos through My3DScanner.com and ended up with a 3D model of the dinosaur.  Clothbot pointed out to me that proper lighting is key – only 12 of the 15 photos were acceptable.  Avoiding too many shadows or a washed out background is important to getting a final model that won’t have holes in it.

So, it would seem anyone with a camera phone and an internet connection might just be carrying around their own bionic eyes.  What I’m dying to see is a model uploaded to Thingiverse that was created by mounting a camera on a quadrocopter, taking a photo or video, and turning a large landmark into a 3D model.

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What would you do with a bionic eye?

Tony Buser posted his own take on the “MakerBot Goggles” phenomena where you see everything as DIY 3D printable:

I think I’ve discovered a corollary to MakerBot Goggles – Spinscan Goggles. Now everything I see I wonder if I can scan and MakerBot a copy.

Making a rote copy and merely duplicating an existing object can definitely be useful.  What I find more interesting is being able to scan a physical object in the world around you and manipulate the 3D image to be remixed into something even more useful.

So, if you were wearing your own Spinscan Goggles, what would you want to scan and duplicate?  What would you want to scan and mashup or remix?

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?

nrp's FaceCube: Copy Real Life with a Kinect and 3D Printer

I think the Penrose Triangle controversy of last month has definitely proved that if you really want to inspire a maker to build something – show them a picture of it, but don’t tell them how you did it.  Thingiverse citizen nrp cites the Fabricate Yourself project as the impetus behind finishing up his own work on FaceCube.  Nrp put together a great write up on his Thingiverse page as well as an even more detailed background on his work on his own blog.  While the process of taking the point cloud from the Kinect to a final usable manifold and printable STL is a multistep and multi-program process, nrp hopes to make this a one-click solution.

Being able to copy real everyday things is a really cool development.   It may sound mundane, but my favorite use of a 3D scanner would almost certainly be to create replacement parts for broken things – just scan all the broken parts, reassemble in a computer¹ , and then crunch out the replacement part.

Then again…  I’d almost certainly use it to mashup real objects.    Like, um, this mug and this… whistle!²

1. I’d probably use my new best friend OpenSCAD [↩]
2. So I can whistle while I work. [↩]