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.