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An acquaintance of mine brought me a leg from a pedestrial with a small statue that was broken and asked if I could make (3D print) a replica. Well here we go.
The picture does not show it well, but the thing was 3.4cm wide. And as you can see, at the left side some of the wood was damaged.
Drawing the thing was difficult as most of the parts were slightly bend or rounded. And drawing such a thing is not my forte.
So I decided to try a different approach.
I scanned the object with my flatbed scanner. That went rather well. There are some shades around the object so I manually cut out the contours in the Gimp (open source alternative for Photoshop).
SVG
In order to get the scanned image into my 3D Cad program (Tinkercad) I had first to convert it into an SVG file as that is the only image file Tinkercad accepts.
For converting the JPG to SVG I used a website called convertio. It can be found here: https://convertio.co/
It is a free service in which you upload your file and indicate to which format you want it converted and after a little time you can download the file in the converted format. The time depends on how busy the site is and how large your file is but generally your request is finished within one or a few minutes. This small file just took a few seconds.
The SVG file can then be imported into Tinkercad and scaled. Don't forget to scale the height of the object. I had to keep the exact length, width and height so this was scaled to 3mm.
When scaled the leg was saved as an STL file.
The STL file was then imported into Cura and at last printed on my Creality CR20 Pro. It took 10 minutes to print.
And here are the original and the copy side by side.
I printed a few of these in black and white. The white versions can be painted with Acrylic paint but that is up to my acquaintance.
Conclusion.
I wanted to try if it was possible to scan a 3D object and reproduce it that way and indeed it was possible. Most of the work was editing the scanned picture in The Gimp. After that it was a piece of cake. The whole process (inclusive printing) took about 2 hour which was mostly due to the lack of experience.
Till next time
have fun
Luc Volders
