This week in class, we had the awesome opportunity of learning to make 3D busts of ourselves. We utilized scanners from a company called Sense 3D which allowed us to capture detailed information from all three dimensions of a solid object. We used the iPad attachment which allowed us to use a standard iPad as the viewfinder for our tool , which made the ease of accessibility high.

We learned how to slowly pan around the object we wanted to scan (in this example, our own faces and shoulders) in order to create a fully rasterized rendering of the details of our profile. It was amazing to see the shape of the scan appear in real time, as we circled around our classmates’ faces. Once we scanned our faces, we then had a rough digital construction of the 3D model. However, we were far from complete. The digital files were often very rough and in need of a lot more refinement. At this point, we imported the models into familiar modeling softwares like Fusion360 and MeshMixer. We would use these tools to refine the rougher edges of our features and create a more natural depiction of what our faces look like.

After this process, we would import our refined busts into Cura to scale it and prepare to print. After completing this process, our busts were ready to go from a simple scan to a finished product of our very own faces – the perfect gift for our moms this coming Mother’s Day!

(This is not an image of Google Photos, not of myself!)

However, this was not a perfect process – there were still many challenges associated with the scanning process. For example, if we had facial hair/hats/other obstructions to our faces, the scan often became rather distorted. Furthermore, we had to manually ensure that all parts of the head and face were scanned, otherwise we’d have to manually recreate pieces of our face in Fusion (replicating natural contours, like in faces, is difficult!). Despite this, this session was an excellent introduction into learning the ubiquity and application of utilizing 3D scanners to bring ideas from theory into existence.