After what seemed like forever, it was nice to be back in the place where our 3D printing journey began, the MakerLab. Looking around the room, I was reminded of how far I’ve come in this journey. From barely knowing anything about 3D printing to accumulating this wealth of knowledge on the subject matter, it’s safe to say that I felt a strong sense of accomplishment. For this past week’s class, we had the opportunity to utilize the scanners. Fortunately, during the Build-A-Printer event, I dabbled with the iSense scanners and gained some first-hand experience using them.

Although I didn’t partake too much in scanning, I thoroughly enjoyed watching how people interacted with the scanners. It reminded me of the issues I had with scanning from earlier at the Build-A-Printer event. To get an accurate scan, it’s imperative to be patient and steady. Regrettably, I didn’t take any photos in this past week’s session, but enjoy this photo of one of my classmates getting scanned! Also, although the scanner is somewhat made out in the photo featuring my peer, here is a picture I found online that will give you a closer, in-depth look of this unique tool. Check out both of these pictures below!

As people continued struggling to perfect their scans, a few of us started playing around with Autodesk’s MeshMixer, which is an extremely cool, state-of-the-art software for working with triangle meshes. The features offered through this software are endless, ranging from 3D sculpting and surface stamping to remeshing and mesh simplification. However, our class mainly utilized this software to smooth out the rough edges of a print. This portion of class was taught by Arielle Rausin, who was kind enough to show us how to use the basic features of this software!

I believe this software will come in handy in the future for a variety of reasons. The most important being that it allows for existing objects to be modified at the discretion of the user. All of the unique facets we learned from the previous class can be applied to my group’s semester project. It’s going to be awesome to see how these newly acquired skills and traits help bring our product to life! I hope to continue dabbling with MeshMixer and perfect the art of scanning.