I recently found that school of Arts and Design at UIC newly purchased a 3D scanner for their industrial design student. Since I am very interested in bunch of technologies around, I decided to give a try just as I did 3D printing before.

A 3D scanner is a kind of data input device. I need to figure out what I would like to scan. Yes, there are many of interesting small piece of object or toy I have. One came fight of my head. Star Wars death star tiles! I purchased this small resin cast model from a guy in UK some time ago.

I brought this model to the lab where a 3D scanner installed. Setup was relatively easy. Just put my model in the scanner; however, software configuration seems very odd. I could not figure out which configuration would be the best at the beginning. The lab specialist, John, also pretty new to this equipment. Anyway, just tried several configurations.

Here is a video footage showing scanning process.

It was fun experiment but I was not that impressed by the result. It clearly need a fair amount trial and error.

Some pictures attached here.

And here is rendering images from Maya.