A 'photo' that won't fit in the family album
Engineers create 3D model of baby's face for partially-sighted mother
Every parent likes to take photos of their children as they grow up, watching their progress over the years and recording their achievements. Baby photos are particularly important and sentimental, highlighting how a child has grown and changed over a short space of time.
For Yuen Har Tse, a partially-sighted mother, the pleasure of observing her child develop seemed a distant reality. That was until 3D Scanners UK provided a solution in the form of a complete three dimensional solid model of her three month old son’s face, acting as a photograph for her to remember him as he once was.
Yuen Har's son 'Johnathan' was scanned with a 3D laser scanner so quickly (and safely) that it could be used on the tiny baby without even waking him!
The scanned data was then imported into InnovMetric's Polyworks software, where the point cloud data was organised and aligned. The data was then used to produce a polygonal mesh
This was then cleaned and edited to create a model suitable for surfacing. A curve network was next plotted on the polygon model, defining the natural curvature for the patch network to follow.
Once the curve network was in place, a patch network was automatically created showing a grid to emphasise any problems that the surface might have with the positioning of the curves.
When happy with the patch network, a nurbs surface was created and exported as an iges model, which would enable a rapid prototype model to be produced.
