Adventures in 3D, Episode 1

After deciding with Bruce to start experimenting with makerscanner, and with my trusty laptop tucked under my arm, we headed to Bruce’s batcave on a cold snowy evening.

We have no wifi in the batcave, so armed with pdf copies of the makerscanner documentation we started our first attempt.

Bruce had already rigged up a jig after reverse engineering the distances between laser and camera from the makerscanner documentation. He’d also found the perfect subject of our first scan: a human skull.

Skull Setup

We spent the next hour or so experimenting with different distances, resolutions, lighting etc. and ended up with a fine selection of point clouds. There was a lot of point noise around the skull but at least we’d got a scan.

Without further ado, we ran the point cloud through meshlab to convert the point cloud to a mesh of polygons. In our impatience we didn’t attempt to clean up the point cloud at all, and this resulted in an interesting mesh:

Scary Skull Mesh

Not quite what we were after and a little bit scary. We spent the rest of the session obtaining more scans of a couple of other objects: a paint bucket and a block of wood, and then decamped for the evening.

Intrigued by the prospect of what would happen if we cleared the point cloud a little, and armed with blender I spent half an hour deleting rogue points from the original scans of the skull. I spent little time on this and then ran it through meshlab again:

Skull Mesh 1 Skull Mesh 2 Skull Mesh 3 Skull Mesh 4

Much better results. Nowhere near good enough for what we need to do, but progress nonetheless.

I also took a bit of video, sorry it’s sideways:

An exciting start to the beginning of the adventure.

Technologies Used In This Episode