Does anyone use the 3D scanner with 3D printer?

[huminlian]

My friend is a 3D printer workshop owner, he often printed characters to sell. He wants to know if he buys a 3D printer scanner, do it the model scanned by 3D scanner can be used for 3D printing?

[Scott.Warren]

You totally can.

Some things to think about:
You would need to turn the point cloud into a water tight mesh once you've scanned your object
Getting data in the hard places, how to capture all sides and deal with shadows and voids
large things often dont scale well when you shrink things down, like a large building scaled to paperweight size (loss of fine detail)
Photogrammetry might be a cheaper, faster method for single small/medium sized objects
the scanner in your like seems to be fine for the purpose (smaller objects)

Thingiverse.com, cults3d.com, myminifactory.com and yeggi.com can be a great resources. plenty of free software to mesh the cloud (Meshlab), and lots of sales people to sell you software as well.

[Scott.Warren]

A T-Rex skull hot off the build plate. Someone else scanned it and I printed on one of my Printers

20200611_163507.jpg

need to tune my extrusion rate

[Dirkie2710]

Funny to find this today.

I'm in the final steps of building a photogrammetry rig to do the same hging (hobby not pro level printing). Just for things around the house.

I've built a setup that should accommodate approximately a 50cm x 50cm x 50cm object. Object is on a motorized spin table. Hardware interface lets you define the number of images per 360 rotation. Eg. you pick 10 steps / 360° : Table will rotate 36° and camera is auto-triggered, then table rotates again 36° and repeats until done. Manual process to move camera up or down on tripod but then just set interface off again and it'll spin object and take photos.

Table has fixed elements for scaling purposes. I'll write a EXIFTools script to add pre-lim XYZ roll pitch yaw values to the images (easy to determine and add in) and then just run it through chosen photogrammetry software : ContextCapture, RealityCapture, Pix4D, Agisoft etc etc.

[landmeterbeuckx]

A T-Rex skull hot off the build plate. Someone else scanned it and I printed on one of my Printers

20200611_163507.jpg

need to tune my extrusion rate

Nice. What printer do you use Scott? Would like to experiment a bit with this. Not only scanning though.

[Scott.Warren]

First FDM Printer was a Monoprice Mini Delta (($80 open box))

20200528_090101.jpg

20200527_182746.jpg

20200519_202251.jpg

20200518_091925.jpg

20190207_213651.jpg

great little guy to learn on, but too small!

[Scott]

Large items can also be meshed from terrestrial scanner files.This sculpture was ~25' (~7.62 m.) tall. With amazing help from Autodesk, the FARO files were meshed, and made 3D print ready. This project was done in 2016. ReMake was the meshing software employed:

https://www.autodesk.com/products/remake/overview
"As of September 7, 2017, ReMake software has been replaced with ReCap Photo, which is available through a subscription to ReCap Photo
Consider moving to ReCap Pro (includes ReCap Photo)
ReCap Photo is our new desktop and cloud solution for UAV and drone processes. ReCap Photo is included with a subscription to ReCap Pro, which is available on a monthly, 1-year, and 3-year plan."

RecapPro seems to be the ticket in 2022.

(1) Composite views from colorized scan images (FARO Scene)
(2) 3D printed model
(3) Screenshot of sculpture after registration (FARO Scene)

[joee09]

Again, what I'm trying to share is how difficult the challenge is of 3D scanning for 3D printing.
You said you were new to 3D printing. Given that it's taken me all this time to master and know what I know about 3D printing, the thousands of dollars I've spent in the industry, the countless nights and hours, and here you are starting out.
I'm not saying these to put you down in any way, I'm saying that this skill- 3D printing is a massive thing to master.

I'm asking about just understanding the machine, upgrading the machine, understanding volume calibration, how the extruder works, what various materials need.

All this to say you assume you are starting with a given printable STL file, and it's now up to you and your skills to orient the object in the slicer, get the right settings to slice it, getting the machine prepared before the print, calibrated, upgraded, and so forth, and then starting the print, monitoring it the entire time, and ending up with a result. Can you read and understand gcode? Can you write your own custom gcode? Do you really understand how the extruder works, the details of a good hotend design VS a bad hotend design? Do you know the firmware and electronics? Do you really know how to master and tune he mechanics of the 3D printer? Can you design and build a better 3D printer?

Then designing for 3D printing requires understanding 3D printing and limitations and all that in getting CAD to export an object and then import that object and have a slicer slice it the way you know it needs to be printed and then setting up the printer and printing it.

But the next hurdle down the road- scanning an object, getting a good 3D point cloud with minimal noise, then still cleaning that up, correcting the mesh, filling the holes, making and basically morphing into a printable 3D object- well you have to have mastered the above previous skills here

Again, a huge piece of this is all the software required, and sure you can play around on trial versions, but at some point it cost $$
Are you then prepared to take that leap?

[mic07]

thankyou so very much joee for such detailed information.