Week 10 - 3D Scanning and Printing

Scanning with the Kinect / Makerbot Printing

This weeks assignment required us to 3D scan ourselves and then adjust the file so that it was suitable for printing on our labs Makerbot TOM. To accomplish this, the first thing we needed to do was determine which method we wanted to use as a group to scan each person. After doing some research the group concluded that ReconstructME was a free software package that would be able to create our scans in a usable form factor. The software uses a driver to interpret the data from a Microsoft Kinect and creates a point cloud that can later be stored to several different file types, I used .OBJ.

After we scanned our files, they were cleaned up. Light, shadow, surrounding furniture, and other items in the room are all captured during the scan and needed to be removed. We also had to reduce and smooth the file. Sometimes uneven or incomplete surfaces were created, following the video below we used several programs to make these changes.

Software used: