Week 5 - 3D Scanning and Printing

3D Scanning and Printing. Exploring the local Art Museum to get inspiration.

Inspiration

This week I went to the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin (near my house), and the antique store down the road. The art museum had some really interesting objects, especially this Chinese Puzzle Ball,

And then at the antique store I found a pool duck, which is what I scanned.

Here’s the link to our Group Site

3D Scanning

I used this fancy program to 3D scan my duck, [VXelements. At first, the scanner was having trouble “reading” Gary (the duck). To alleviate this, I put these dots over the duck to help it triangulate the duck.

Once the scan was good enough, I edited the scan to remove some noise. Then brought it into MeshMixer to make the model “water tight”.

Also in MeshMixer, I used this tutorial to make a voronoi pattern, however, it was turning out real weird. There were too many triangles. So I brought the mesh into Fusion 360, and reduced the triangles there in the Mesh Editor. Exported it out to STL again, and back into MeshMixer, where the tutorial worked better. I was going to print it, but I don’t actually want it…

3D Printing

The Chinese Puzzle Ball blew my mind - craftsmen carved this ball out of ONE piece of ivory (now they use jade), but I thought it would be perfect to replicate and 3D print, but slightly different, more simple, and within the requirements.

The ball is just concentric spheres, with holes in them. I’d like to print this on the fancy 3D printer, so that I can utelize the soluable support and multiple colors.

I brought the file into the fancy printer lab, with the machines that have soluble support systems. This would make it easier for the inside stuff to come out.

This is the machine that removes the support systems. It smells SO WEIRD.

Unfortunately, the print was lost. It’s been a year and also a pandemic. I think, just like my mental state, it broke! I’ll make another one some other time.