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Apr 18

How we 3D-printed our heads

Posted in: 3D printing, Designed in Hackney, Inition, Print Shift, Sample and Hold

Rather than publish our photos on the contributors’ page of the Print Shift 3D-printing magazine we launched this week, we thought it would be fun to get ourselves scanned and printed out. Here’s how we did it.

3D printed heads of the Print Shift team for Dezeen by Sample and Hold and Inition

First we headed to Sample and Hold, a scanning bureau in Dalston, east London, down the road from the Dezeen office. Sample and Hold has developed its own scanning system featuring 18 professional DSLR cameras mounted in a semicircular grid.

We took turns to sit motionless in the centre of the array as the cameras captured us from multiple angles. Sample and Hold then merged the images to build up a 3D likeness of each of our faces.

3D printed heads of the Print Shift team for Dezeen by Sample and Hold and Inition

This system has an advantage over other scanning techniques because it is near-instantaneous and so can capture natural facial expressions.

However, it is not so good at dealing with the complexity, volume and low tonal range of the average hairstyle, so a Mephisto scanner was used to scan the back and sides of our heads.

3D printed heads of the Print Shift team for Dezeen by Sample and Hold and Inition

This device projected a pixellated pattern onto the hair and recorded the position of each pixel to create a digital model of the hairdo. Sample and Hold merged this with the facial scans to create the final 3D model of each person.

3D printed heads of the Print Shift team for Dezeen by Sample and Hold and Inition

We then took the 3D files to creative 3D-technology company Inition in Shoreditch, east London, to be printed. Further processing was required to make the files print-ready: the 3D models were hollowed out and scaled to the appropriate size and then broken down into a sequence of two dimensional layers to be printed.

3D printed heads of the Print Shift team for Dezeen by Sample and Hold and Inition

Inition printed our heads with a ZPrinter, which fuses layers of plaster powder with a binding agent. All seven of our heads were printed together, which took eight hours. Any unbound powder was then vacuumed and brushed away, revealing the fully-formed 3D models inside.

3D printed heads of the Print Shift team for Dezeen by Sample and Hold and Inition

Unboxing the heads at the Dezeen office was an uncanny experience, as it was the first time any of us had seen a three-dimensional likeness of ourselves. “I wish I’d brushed my fringe,” said Rose while Paul’s reaction was: “Who’s the bald guy?”

Sample and Hold used the same processes to scan a horse for the Turner prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger, who used the resulting 3D model to create a life-sized marble and resin statue.

We also previously featured Inition’s augmented-reality iPad app that allows architects to look inside static architectural models, visualise how their building will look at night and track how wind flows around their design proposals.

The post How we 3D-printed
our heads appeared first on Dezeen.

Mar 22

London studio creates 3D scan of horse

Posted in: 3D printing, Designed in Hackney, Mark Wallinger, Sample and Hold

News: Hackney studio Sample and Hold 3D-scanned a living horse for a new sculpture by Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger.

Unveiled this week on The Mall in London, The White Horse is a scaled-down version of a 50-metre-high sculpture Wallinger eventually hopes to build in Ebbsfleet, Kent.

Mark Wallinger unveils The White Horse

Technicians at Sample and Hold helped create the sculpture by using a white light scanner to produce a 3D image of a racehorse named Riviera Red.

By projecting a grid of white light onto the horse’s body and recording the resulting distortions, the technicians built up a three-dimensional map of the animal’s shape. The 3D image was then used to make a mould to cast the sculpture from a mixture of marble dust and resin.

Mark Wallinger unveils The White Horse

The horse was unveiled this week outside the headquarters of the British Council, the cultural institution that commissioned the artwork, where it will remain for two years before going on an international tour.

Wallinger hopes the life-size sculpture will re-ignite interest in his larger project in Ebbsfleet, which was commissioned in 2009 but stalled when the UK went into recession. The costs of the project are believed to be between £12 million and £15 million.

Mark Wallinger unveils The White Horse

Like 3D printing, 3D scanning is becoming increasingly accessible and affordable – earlier this week we reported on a prototype for a desktop scanner that would allow users to digitally scan objects they want to replicate with a 3D printer at home.

Photographs are by Frank Noon for the British Council.

Here’s some more information from the British Council:

‘The White Horse’, a new sculpture by Mark Wallinger, was unveiled outside the British Council’s London headquarters on the Mall today. Made of marble and resin, the sculpture is a life-size representation of a thoroughbred racehorse created using state of the art technology in which a live horse has been scanned using a white light scanner in order to produce a faithfully accurate representation of the animal standing on a broad plinth of Portland stone and facing down The Mall.

Commissioned by the British Council Collection, this major work will stand on The Mall for two years before becoming available for international display.

In 2008, Mark Wallinger won The Ebbsfleet Landmark Project, an international competition to build a monument at Ebbsfleet in Kent. Wallinger’s winning entry, a white horse, 25 times life-size, and standing some 50 metres tall, was designed to look out over what was once Watling Street. The White Horse in Spring Gardens is a life-sized version of this sculpture.

The White Horse illustrates Wallinger’s continuing fascination with the horse, and its emblematic status in our national history. The origins of the white horse as the emblem of Kent can be traced from ‘Horsa’ – the derivation of the modern word horse – a semi-mythological Anglo-Saxon leader who landed near Ebbsfleet on the Isle of Thanet in the 6th century. The White Horse sculpture relates to the ancient history of hillside depictions of white horses in England but the pose is familiar from current depictions of thoroughbred stallions and has been replicated throughout the history of art from Stubbs’ painting of Eclipse to Wallinger’s own paintings of stallions from the Darley Stud.

The Thoroughbred was first developed at the beginning of the 18th century in England, when native mares were crossbred with imported Arabian stallions. Every racehorse in the world is descended from these animals. 90% from the Darley Arabian, the most dominant influence on the breed.

The proximity of the equestrian statues of Charles I and George IV on Trafalgar Square, and the Piazza’s location only a stone’s throw from Horse Guards Parade, make the siting of this sculpture particularly resonant. As does the fact that The Mall remains a processional route of cavalry parades.

Andrea Rose, Director Visual Arts, British Council, said: “A white horse in the centre of London is a wonderful sight. It sparks associations – ancient and modern; war and peace; rural and urban; sport and pleasure. I hope it puts a spring in the step of all who pass it on the Mall.”

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3D scan of horse appeared first on Dezeen.