Nov.15, 2012
Getting a 3D personal action figure is getting popular, lucky people in Japan or in Spain and go directly to local 3D printing photo booth. At the 2012 Pittsburgh Mini Maker Faire, computer engineer Jeremy Herrman ran a booth where people could get 3D scanned and take home a 3D printed miniature of themselves. You might have heard about the Kinect from Microsoft. Nowadays hobbyists can use Kinect and software tool ReconstructMe to capture 3D models in real-time. But going from raw 3D scan to a printable miniature figurine still requires many steps.
Raw 3D scans need to be cleaned up before sending to the printer because the scanned mesh could have holes, extra geometry and artifacts. Often it could take an hour to deal with all kinds of issues. But for a photo booth while all people were waiting for their prints, Jeremy needed to automate the process as much as possible.
To solve the problem Jeremy wrote a program ScanBooth. ScanBooth is a collection of software for running a 3D photo booth. It is designed to work with ReconstructMe and includes tools for automating 3D scan capture, cleanup, printing and sharing.
Here's what ScanBooth can do:
A rails webapp
- Allows users to enter their contact information when they get scanned.
- Stores status of user prints, uploads and emails.
Delayed job framework
- Upload scans to sketchfab.
- Upload scans to an FTP server.
- Email users links to their scans for viewing/downloading.
Scan workflow automation
- Auto launch ReconstructMe and start scan
- Automated scan cleanup with meshlab
(Images credit: Jeremy Herrman)
Using this software Jeremy was able to get the turnaround time down from over an hour to about 8 minutes. To try it out yourself simply download the free code on github.
Source: Jherman
Posted in 3D Software
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