Microscribe Digitising arm

I had a chance while Paul from Modelmaking want looking to steal his microscribe digitising arm!

I had previously made a shape upstairs using the spot welder, with the intention  of using this magical device to input the geometry directly into Rhino in order to further edit it, and include it into visualisation and 3D models for milling / printing. 

Basic Rhino knowledge is required, but shapes can be plotted out almost straight away and / or exported to other software packages for further editing and manipulation. In the following series of images you can see the initial shape, the interaction of the arm with the object, and a set of screen shots taken of the outcomes.

I left the printer running overnight to realise some of the forms for us, so i'll follow up this post with pics of those!

The spot welded object

Typical setup

accurate placement of points taken from the model

physical and digital model can be seen

Wireframe build from simple 2D lines

Shape replicated using 3 / 4 sided surfaces

Surfaces turned into a low res mesh and offset / solidified

Point cloud data joined with interpolated curves

Curves used to create 3 / 4 sided surfaces 

The mesh imported to 3DSMax, with polygons inset

Inset mesh, offset and solidified

Mesh smooth modifier made it transform dramatically

The three meshes i sent to print

From setup to hitting the print button, took a couple of hours. The technology lends itself to being accessible from either a reverse engineering perspective, as as in this case a simpler and more tactile way of creating digital data which can be further manipulated in software environments.

The plans for these models will be further exploration of form once printed, and added to with soft materials such as clay, and harder denser materials such as styreen metals. From here, the process can start over again being re digitised, manipulated, rendered and critiqued. 

See you on the other side ;)