At Saturday 10/30/99 , michael rees wrote:
>We're into some interesting territory here. Through my research I found out
>(not many specifics unfortunately) that there was a company in New York
all the
>way back to the 70's that was doing automatic portraits using CNC milling.
I'm
>not sure how they got the data, but it was a lifelike portrait. The business
>failed. The cost per portrait was around $500 bucks. I saw a product. It was
>beautiful. Maybe thats an indicator that people don't want it without the
>"artistic" hand. Maybe its time hasn't come yet.
>In "The Studio" at siggraph this year, we had a head scanner set up and
>software and rp equipment to produce portraits. It was very popular.
>...
Some years ago in Holland a company called Global Sculpture
offered a similar service (licensed from the French Kreon company).
The company operated a 3D scanner for heads. The customer was
scanned, and after a few weeks the 3D buste was delivered, created
using CNC machining in any requested material, and in various
sizes.
However, unfortunately they ceased operations, mainly due to lack
of customers (too expensive ? lack of colour ? ...)
What was most interesting in this case in a technological sense
was the fact that only PART OF the work was done automatically.
The computer model resulting from the scan was sufficiently accurate
ONLY for a roughing operation, after which a skilled artist manually
finished the statue, using a series of conventional 2D photo prints
as a guideline.
Using the current state-of-the-art equipment for Reverse Engineering
I think that this is indeed still neccessary to create a 3D portrait
that indeed can be recognized. Very important for recognition are the
many intricate small details like the area around the eyes (small
wrinkles etc). 3D laser scanners (at least the fast ones needed for
humans) are just not accurate enough. Earlier this year during the
National Design Engineering Show in Chicago we scanned a number
of faces using the new Minolta scanner (great piece of equipment !)
and machined 3D portraits on desktop CNC mill. The results were
nice, and could be recognized when seen next to 'the original',
however it was difficult to recognize the sculpture without knowing
who it was.
So for a good 3D portrait an artist still is needed; who can now skip
all the labout intensive preparations and only do the interesting finishing
part.
Or, for this application I think that color can indeed help out as well.
In case of a colored prototype the small details can just be ignored in 3D:
the 2D color information can take care of these. A very rough
approximation of the original person still can be recognized easily (as
a pure 2D photo is recognized as well). As the first color RP systems
are now being developed it would be very interesting to see some
first results: if available any picture is welcome on the rp-ml.
Best Regards,
Lex Lennings.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Delft Spline Systems, The Netherlands.
We offer DeskProto: affordable Rapid Prototyping using CNC milling
Mailto:info@spline.nl Website: http://www.deskproto.com
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:53:14 EEST