Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - how I scanned and 3D-printed my kids

The kids scanned and 3D-printed

Medio 2011 I bought a Xbox Kinect sensor and adapter. This adapter feeds power to the sensor and has a normal USB-connector to connect it to a PC.

Adapter to connect a Xbox Kinect to a PC

I did no buy it to play games with, but to play with it on the PC using the than just released Kinect SDK for Windows. At the end of 2011 I saw the Kinect Fusion presentation held at 28C3 about reconstruction of 3D surfaces using the Kinect sensor by David Kim, a PhD student from Newcastle University sponsored by Microsoft research. Since then several software products were created that did something similar. I have tried several and liked Skanect the best. It is not free software however. You can scan and recreate a model using the trail version, to save the model file you need the licensed version. To scan a model, it is better not to circle to much around it. Try to do it in one go. I thought: the more times I go around the model, the better. But that’s not how it turned out. The resulting file was big because there seemed to be a model inside the model. So, it’s best to go around the model just once.

Self portrait

I like the full body scanner rig they build at 3Dify. Hope to find the time and space to create one myself.

Align STL model to bottom plane

Sometimes I am handed a STL-file with a model rotated such that is hard to print on a FDM (Fused deposition modeling) type of 3D-printer. Like the heart in this model (created using tinkercad.com):

The model is opened in netfabb Studio Basic 4.9, which is the freeware version. For a FDM type of printer, most of the time, you want the biggest plane facing down. You can do that by performing following steps in netfabb Studio Basic:

Click the 'Align to bottom plane' button from the button bar.

Now rotate the model (right mouse button + move) such that the part you want to be facing down (the backside) is visible. Once it is visible, double click it.

Alakazam: now its back is aligned to the bottom plane. Save it by a right click on the model and select: Export part - as STL.