Transcript:
How’s it going, 3d printers? Andrew, sink here. And in this video, we’re going to be talking about how to scan and 3d print a replica of this cat figurine. The app were going to be using is called Scandi Pro. It’s an ios app that uses the truedepth front-facing camera on an iphone to create a mesh model for our setup. I have the iphone running Scandi pro on a tripod, so it’s stationary and then I’ve put the cat on a lazy Susan, So I’ll be spinning that back and forth, so we can create our mesh once we have a good quality scan. We’re going to clean it up in meshmixer to make it printable and then send it off to our 3d printer, so we can make a copy of this figurine once we have everything set up and in place, we’ll check to make sure that the scandi app sees the model in the foreground. Once we’ve got to this point, we can hit start and now it will begin scanning from here. All we have to do is slowly. Rotate the lazy Susan making sure that the cat figurine stays in focus. If we see a red flash, that means the cameras lost it’s tracking, so we can always move back and then go back into the original position to continue scanning for this model. I did two full revolutions of the lazy Susan, and that’s so I captured a good amount of surface detail and also because this was a really shiny model. I wanted to make sure that any glare didn’t show up as a defect later on [Music]. Once I was happy with the scan, I hit end record, and now I can view what the mesh looks like, and this looks pretty good to me, so we’ve captured a lot of the detail. There’s a few small holes like on the top of the ear and under the chin, but we can fix those later overall. I’m happy with this, so I’m to hit save from Scandi Pro. We also have some basic editing functionality and one of the first things that you can do is under render mode we can determine if we’re looking at a color model or a monochrome, So because I’m going to be 3d printing this, I’m not too worried about the texture. Which is the color? I’m more interested in the mesh. So by clicking monochrome, I can view the mesh and I can see. This is going to work for me. Scandi pro has some basic editing tools built into it like fill holes and crop plane. But we’re going to be doing a lot of that in mesh mixer. So even though we’re not doing it here, it’s good to know that we have that ability in the app from here. All we have to do is export the STL and bring it into meshmixer. The first thing we want to do is trim away the lazy Susan So to do that, we’re going to select all of the non-cat geometry and we’re going to delete it, so there’s a couple different ways. You can do this the easiest way to do. It is to use the lasso tool in mesh mixer, select a large chunk and then click X and that will delete it and once we have a couple of these sections deleted, we can then do a plain cut to trim away what’s left. This is just a fast and easy way to get rid of a lot of that geometry. So I feel pretty good about this right here, so from here. The next step is we’re going to do a plane cut and typically a plane cut is used to create a solid model which we will be doing later here, though. For instance, I’m going to say no fill under fill type because I don’t actually want to fill the bottom of the model in yet. I still have some holes that I need to clean up first, so we can get down to about here so so it looks like a nice, solid model all the way around and that looks good to me and we’ll click accept, so we’re already getting closer to what we want our final model to look like there are a couple spots on this model that I’m going to clean up manually, Depending on how much time and effort you want to put into a project like this. You can spend more or less time doing it. All I’m gonna do is using the flatten brush in mesh mixer under the sculpt tools. I’m gonna clean up a little bit of this geometry here because that looks a little bit rough to me, and we’re going to do a little bit more manual cleanup later, But right now all I’m trying to do is make these holes a little bit clearer, so this geometry is now a little bit easier to fill, and it doesn’t look quite as jagged, so from here. The fill process should be a little bit easier on the top of that ear. There are a couple of small spots in a few different holes that we want to fill the easiest way to do that is using the inspector tool. This will go through and manually close up a lot of these small holes. There’s still some manual work. We’re going to want to do, but this is a good way to get started. This process can take a minute, so we’re just going to jump cut until when it’s finished. So after running the inspector tool, we can see the model looks better already. A lot of those small holes have been filled, but we still want to go back and before we run our final smoothing operation, It’s not a bad idea to just go and clean up a couple areas and so what we’re going to do is go through and look for some of the areas that have bumps and flatten them out just a little bit, so that’s going to smooth down a little bit easier. One of the larger holes on this model was directly under the chin. So we want to spend a little bit of time here, and, you know, depending on how much time you want to put into the model you can either, you know, spend a good bit of time reconstructing this or just doing what I’m gonna do, which is we’re just gonna go through and try and clean up that border, just a little bit to make it look a little bit smoother. It’s not a perfect fix, but it is a quick way to get the model to a better place so once we finish with that process. We’ve got a smoothed out area here. I am definitely not a sculptor, so this can be done a lot better and especially if you have a little bit more time to dedicate to it. So once we get to this point. The model is looking pretty good. We can do any last detailing. We want to do before we run the smooth and so I’m going to go through and just add a little bit of. I’m going to use the flatten brush just to sort of help highlight some of these areas where I want to separate. You know, the cat from the base and also some of the features of the cat as well, so there’s a few different ways. You can do this and again. Depending on how accurate you want your model to be, you can spend more or less time on this process. So once we’re finished manually sculpting the model, it’s time to run our final smoothing and to do that we are going to select the entire model and then go to deform smooth here’s. Our smooth model and meshmixer did a great job of going through and removing a lot of that graininess while overall, preserving the shape of the model. So once we get to this point. This is a pretty good place to hit accept and thatll. Give us our smooth model from here. I’m going to run one more plane cut and the idea is to give us a nice flat base with no curling on the outer edges. So when we click accept, that’s going to give us our final model. So now we have a model that’s been smoothed out, has a flat base and it’s ready for 3d printing so from here, we’re going to export the STL file, bring it into our slicing software and send it to the printer, so here’s the cat in our slicing software. I’m going to be printing this out on my minga d2 and I’m using Prusa slicer to generate the g-code and I can also do a quick tool path preview. Go through the model to make sure there’s no last-minute issues. The only thing I see here is some overhang on the chin. So we’ll see how that comes out other than that. This file is ready to go. [MUSIC] And now we have our 3d printed copy. This workflow from Scandi Pro to meshmixer to 3d printer is pretty easy, and I think it’s fairly accessible. Even for beginners. Scandi Pro offers a free version which allows you to save one file per day. If you want to do more than that, they offer a weekly monthly and annual subscription plan. I think the price is pretty reasonable. Given the overall quality of the scan, I’d love to hear what you’re planning on scanning with Scandi pro, so feel free to leave me a comment below and as always, thanks for watching and have fun printing.