I did a proof of concept test for the 3d scanning portion of Gecko Condo's last cosmetic step tonight and figured I would share the results.

The ultimate goal here is to create plastic gargoyles of gecko heads that will serve as bolt covers for all of the exposed hardware in gecko condo. Rather than draw all the heads from scratch, it would be much easier to capture a 3d scan of some of the geckos and use those wireframes to make 3d models that a 3d printer can use. I purchased a Printerbot+ through the Printrbot kickstarter campaign and I hope for this to be some of the first printing I use it for once it arrives in the next couple months or so. Nothing stopping me from working on some of the models until then!

The first thing I needed to do was build a device for rotating either the geckos or the camera. I tried rotating the geckos first, but this didn't work out too well. I ended up with one terrified gecko turning itself into a pretzel while it tried to figure out why it was spinning in circles. Since that wouldn't work, I decided instead to build a jig to rotate a camera. I took some leftover MDF and a lazy susan and made this:

The top and bottom platform stay fixed while the middle arm rotates freely with a camera attached via a cheap 3 leg tripod zip-tied to the end.

With this built, I stuck some random objects and a gecko on the middle of the jig and started filming with a pocket camera. I shot a few different geckos, but here is the video from one of them:



With this video I used the software VirtualDub to generate an image stream, decimating 17 frames between output images. This gave me around 60 images to use for the 3d scan.

I then used a software called Autodesk 123 Catch to generate a 3d scan. Here are a couple of screen shots of the gecko, now as a 3d model.

As you can see, the model needs some work. If I can get better lighting, better image quality and perhaps better software I can create better models. It would help if I could get the geckos to stand still long enough for me to use a point and shoot, but I think using video is much more likely to succeed in capturing 360 degree shots before they move. Even with a model like this I can be many steps ahead of scratch by just using the wireframe of the geckos head and making changes in some other software to create the bolt covers.