Week 05: 3D Scanning and Printing¶

Voronoi Beads¶

Organic-shaped beads — I designed and printed voronoi spheres, which may be modified to a shell of the turtle robot later.

Assignments¶

Group assignment:¶

Test the design rules for your 3D printer(s)
Document your work on the group work page and reflect on your individual page what you learned about characteristics of your printer(s)

Individual assignments¶

Design, document and 3D print an object (small, few cm3, limited by printer time) that could not be easily made subtractively
3D scan an object (and optionally print it)

1. Group Assignment¶

We tested the design rules for our printer Bambu Lab P1S and documented on FabLab Kannai group work page.

I found that with some angles and bridging you can 3D print without support much more than I had imagined before.

2. Individual Assignment - 3D printing¶

I was somehow drawn to the organic shapes of voronoi structures, and dreamed that my drawing robot, which is basically a turtle robot, would have a voronoi-inspired shell.

2-1. first try ❌¶

For week 5, I need to make it small, so I decided to make voronoi sphere beads.

This voronoi bead shape was only achievable additively because its omnidirectional undercuts, hollow lattice structure, and organic topology make it impossible to reach all surfaces with any subtractive tool.

I followed a YouTube tutorial first to create a basic voronoi sphere. However, as I printed it without support, the sphere rolled sideways while printing and did not finish. Damaged sphere

2-2. Second try ✅¶

Second, I decided to develop my own design, and also make it smaller like a bead, with walls thick enough.

As the default measurement of Blender is meters, I set up the measurement to be millimeters.

Blender settings

Then I started with a 20mm cube and added modifiers in this order.

Subdivision — Catmull-Clark (Levels Viewport: 3, Render: 5, Quality: 1)
Cast — Sphere
Decimate — Planar (Angle Limit: 30°, All Boundaries: on)
Wireframe — Thickness: 0.4mm
Subdivision — Catmull-Clark (Levels Viewport: 3, Render: 3, Quality: 3)
Cast — Sphere (Factor: 3mm)

Print with support

This time, I decided to print with support. To avoid support going inside the sphere, I checked the “on build plate only” option so that the support can be easily removed. (This time, I printed it with my Bambu Lab A1 mini at home.)

Voronoi bead

3. Individual Assignment - 3D Scanning¶

For the scanning assignment, I scanned the torso of our instructor Tamiya-san using a Creality CR-Scan Ferret Pro.

3-1. Setup¶

I downloaded the Creality Scan software from the Creality website and installed it on my Macbook Air. The scanner connects via USB-C, so I plugged it in before launching the app — the software detects it automatically.

Once opened, I created a new project and selected Face as the scan mode. This mode is optimized for scanning human faces.

3-2. Calibration¶

Before scanning, the software prompts you to calibrate the scanner using the included calibration board. I placed the board flat on a table, held the scanner at the recommended distance (roughly 30–50 cm), and slowly moved it across the board until all calibration points were detected and the bar turned green. This step is important — skipping it leads to inaccurate geometry.

3-3. Scanning Tamiya-san¶

Our instructor Tamiya-san stood still as the model. I walked around him slowly, holding the scanner at a steady distance of about 40 cm and tilting it slightly upward and downward.

The live preview in the software showed the point cloud building up in real time, which helped me see which areas I was missing. The tricky parts were:

Dark hair — The infrared scanner struggles with very dark or reflective surfaces. Tamiya-san’s dark hair absorbed the laser, and the model was not complete around there.
Keeping the scanner tracking — If you move too fast or stray too far from an already-scanned surface, the scanner loses tracking and you have to re-align.

3-4. Post-processing¶

Once I stopped the scan, the software automatically merged the frames into a single mesh. Creality Scan allows you to use the following tools, but I exported the file as is as a .ply file with texture.

Simplify — reduces the polygon count to keep the file manageable.
Hole Fill — fills the gaps in the model
Smooth — applies a light smoothing pass to reduce the noise.

3-5. Result¶

Scanned Tamiya-san

The scan captured the general shape of his torso well, but the hair was not captured well and the dark shirt caused some uneven patches. Overall it was much harder than I expected — getting complete, clean coverage of a person requires patience.

Checklist¶

[x] Linked to the group assignment page
[x] Explained what you learned from testing the 3D printers
[x] Documented how you designed and 3D printed your object and explained why it could not be easily made subtractively
[x] Documented how you scanned an object
[x] Included your original design files for 3D printing
[x] Included your hero shots