“I’m with some Maker lab people looking back at it.”

This week in class, we had the pleasure of having former 3D printing student, Arielle Rausin, give us a presentation of 3D scanning technologies. The whole process looked very interesting but also pretty challenging. In order to get a good scan, the scanner has to be held steadily and the person (or object) being scanned has to rotate slowly on an axis to ensure that every part gets scanned. After performing the scanning, Meshmixer was used to clean up the 3D scan by smoothing out surfaces or filling in holes.

3D scanning is a really neat technology that allows us to scan anything in real life and reproduce the exact same model in 3D print. Beyond that, 3D scanning also allows us to enhance the virtual world. Below is a really interesting video of 3D scanning a person and then turning them into an avatar in a video game. Here’s an article that talks more about this technology.

After learning about 3D scanning, we continued to work on our final projects in our individual groups. During the last session, we printed out the 3D material that will hold the Arduino for our Maker bot. This time, we worked on the outer portion of the bot which includes the face and body. In the end, we will be using plywood and laser cutting for those parts but for the sake of prototyping, we just used cardboard to make a rough model. The prototype turned out to be slightly bigger than expected so we learned that we should readjust our scale and make it more suitable in size.