Armed with this cool piece of kit, how best to show it off? Remembering that we have 3D printers in the hardware lab we set about making busts of our own heads. The app takes about 3-5 minutes to fully capture an object, and works best for items that are ~20cm square. Much smaller and you don't have enough resolution to see things clearly, and as you go bigger things take exponentially longer. Luckily head size is perfect!
Normally to print on the 3d printers that the department owns you need to use a program that interfaces with the printer (like prontaface) as well as an intermediate program to convert model files to gcode instructions that tell the printer head where it should move (such as slic3r).However, after someone hinted that Windows 10 had some level of built in support for 3d printers, that seemed like a more interesting (if not necessarily better) option. Much to our surprise, it's amazing. You just plug the printer in, open a model, and click print. Some scaling issues notwithstanding, it's so much easier and more effective than the previously mentioned manual approach, at least for simple tasks.
The results are pretty cool. It's a high enough resolution that you can tell it's a model of me (and there were higher resolution options available in the windows model printer), and the whole process is pretty straightforward. Being able to scan things in makes having the printer a lot more useful, as having to model a replacement bracket or whatever yourself never really works out as well as you think it will.
