rapman-education's posterous

rapman-education's posterous

Dave White  //  A place for educators, teachers, lecturers and students to find "stuff" about RapMan,BfB3000 and BfB 3DTouch printers... The unofficial Blog by Dave White, Advanced Skills Teacher and Head of D&T in Clevedon School UK.

May 30 / 8:28pm

What's the catch? 3D scan for 3D print.

(download)

There is no catch.... Just feeble attempt at a "catchy" title for this post about Autodesk 123D Catch for pc and iPad.

 

Earlier in the week the 123D Catch app for the Ipad became available from the Apple app store in the UK... So I promptly downloaded and installed it. It was a parent/teacher meeting last night so I had to wait... Grrrr.

But tonight I had my first attempt... A pretty successfully too as you can see in the photos. And even more impressive is that it really is the very first attempt!

 

I did have a go at uploading pictures using the PC program but somehow never really got to grips with it. But the iPad app is a real dream, ok the app takes the photos and uploads them and then shows you a wonderful 3D representation of your object but you still need the PC version to download the mesh file in .obj format.

 

Anyway having downloaded the mesh you do meed to do a bit of editing. The mesh is not "watertight" and has a huge hole in the base. You will need a program to do this, I used netfabb basic but meshlab is another alternative. I found that slicing off the bottom (which looks very like a pizza on my scan) saved a lot of manipulation and triangle editing.

 

Once the mesh was ready (I only downloaded the medium quality by the way) I converted the file into gcode for my 3D Touch and printed a scaled down version as I was too impatient to wait for a big print.

 

Oh, and what is the object I scanned? It's an antique plaster model of a hand borrowed from our Art Department... Thanks guys! Im not entirely certain but I think the hand is holding a borax cone. These cones used to be used by jewellers and the like, they ground the cone in a wet ceramic bowl to make a paste to use as flux for silver soldering. I used to do a bit of silversmithing so I just love this connection!

 

So, my next thoughts are... What do I scan next? How can I use this in school? And.....

 

Filed under  //  3dscanning   dt   education   printing   software  
May 8 / 7:07pm

3D Scanning for 3D Printing..Free!

File

Some time ago Autodesk released 123D Catch, a free (beta), online service for creating 3D objects using just an ordinary digital camera. I couldn't resist giving it a go! But I didn't have great success, probably due to my impatience... I just didn't take enough photos... You need to upload about 50 to 70 pictures!

Well it looks like the guys at Bits from Bytes (3D Systems) have been doing a bit of experimenting and judging by the above photo they have been more successful than me!

The BfB guys have also been looking at using a kinect camera to produce 3D objects using the free ReconstructMe software.. Wish I had one of those kinects to play with.

Anyway, if you are interested to give it a go yourself just have a look on the BfB website (just click the "support" button at the top of the homepage and select "technical resources", scroll down to the bottom of the page for the links to the information).

Of course being "free" this is ideal for experimenting with in schools, I really must give it a go again. If you try it yourself or with your students why not let us know how you get on.

Filed under  //  3D Scanning   printing