We had a VIP in the office this month, My great uncle David.
David worked for a printing company when he was younger. I had often had conversations with him about 3D printing and he had always taken a lot of interest in the work that I do. So now that we have the new showroom set up in our new warehouse we thought it would be a good time for him to come in for a visit, check out some of the new printers and see what it was all about.
While he was here, we got on to the conversation of 3D scanners, so I thought it would be nice for him to get a scan of himself so he could get some first hand experience of how it all worked and get a print of himself done as a souvenir.
It was also a nice excuse to try out our new Revopoint large turntable and the new Creality Raptor X, both of which we had used before, but not together and we hadn't had a good opportunity to test them both to their full capacity until now.
David was a fantastic scanning subject, the Raptor and turntable performed beautifully, and this turned out to be one of the best scans we have ever done. It's a perfect example of what's possible with modern scanners.
These kinds of scanners usually struggle with hair, fur and other fine or very thin details, but the raptor X picked up all of these details beautifully and the tracking was very smooth when running on my office computer. We have used similar scanners with laptops and other portable devices in the past, and how good the frame rates and tracking are usually depends heavily on the device you're using it with. There were a few issues with tracking and choppy frame rates when I tested this scanner on my computer when we first got it, and it turns out that the reason for this is that the CrealityScan software does not automatically use the dedicated graphics card if you have one in your computer. To solve this you need to tell Creality scan to use the GPU. Why it doesn't do this automatically I'm not sure, but it only took a few seconds of changing settings in the software to allow it to use the GPU, and once this was enabled it made a huge difference to the performance. So it's definitely worth keeping this in mind if you have one of these scanners or you are looking to get one.
The clean up on the scan data was mostly done in Creality scan, and once I was happy with the scan data, I exported it and finished off editing in Blender. There was not much editing that needed to be done in blender as Creality scan is very good at producing a watertight mesh that's ideal for 3d printing. So all that was really needed was a few adjustments to soften up some of the parts that were too thin to print effectively, and I added a nice flat base so the finished print could stand on its own. Blender is ideal for this kind of post scan editing. The sculpting tab is a very powerful bit of software, and it's free, so if you want to give it a try there is nothing to lose!
After a chat with David, he was kind enough to let us use this scan for a print and share it for our print of the month so we can show all of you these amazing results.
For the Print, we used a Bambu labs X1 Carbon with Copymaster Marble PLA at a 1.6mm layer height, to give this beautiful statue effect. I printed one to send to David, and I've been told it now takes pride of place in his living room, and I printed another copy for us to keep in the showroom so that anyone else that comes for a visit can get an idea of what these scanners and printers are capable of. I also took a quick timelapse on the X1 Carbon so I could show people how it was made which you can see below.
If you think the scanner, turntable, printer or filament we used to create this scan is something you would like to try for yourself, you can find each of them on the website via the links below.
Hopefully, next month will have our new Bambu labs H2D display model in the showroom to show off for our next print of the month, so watch this space!
