I ended up not completing this project for my final project since I felt that this had no conceptual backing and was really just something I wanted to try and do.

3D structured light scanning is a way of taking images of 3D objects and creating meshes or 3D point clouds from the images. You can do it at home by projecting alternating patterns of striped light across a person or surface. You take 3 images of the object or person, each image has a different pattern projected onto it. Then you run the image through a program that assembles figures out the distances between the points of the object and creating a 3D point cloud. However, this is very difficult to get right, and you need rather precise lighting in order to produce the correct effect. Whenever I have tried it, it usually just ends up flat.

When done correctly, it should look like this:

Or this:

I was never able to CNC route this because the times were really full and I didn’t want to take time away from people who were routing for their final project. What I wanted to make was a nest chair structure and I tried to design it so that it wouldn’t need glue to be held together.

Top view

Front view

Perspective shot 1

Perspective shot 2, rendered

Using this photo as a base:

I created a curve for the coral and then extruded the shape up about a quarter of an inch. Then using flow around surface, I shaped the coral extrusion around a sphere.

This is the resulting curve from the coral shard.

This is a front facing view of the extruded coral flowed around the surface of a sphere.

This is a 3/4 view of the extruded coral.

If I remade this project and reprinted it, then I would probably use things like the pipe function to make the coral look more realistic. I would also probably experiment more with different shapes while using flow around surface.

This is the 3D object from a point cloud assignment. I used a pint glass as the object and then practiced using the sweep function to move the curve that I created from the points around a line in order to create the glass.

These 3D printed shells are part of a project called Project Shellter. The idea is to make shells for hermit crabs to live in instead of the trash that they are sometimes forced to live in due to a worldwide shell shortage. Miles Lightwood is the person responsible for this idea, although he is working with the MakerBot community as well. Here are the links:

http://www.facebook.com/ProjectShellter

http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2011/10/18/project-shellter-can-the-makerbot-community-save-hermit-crabs/

http://laughingsquid.com/project-shellter-success-hermit-crabs-adopt-3d-printed-shells/