So after throwing this model into MeshCam and Mach3, waiting for around an hour and a half, and doing barely any cleanup, I was left with a perfect block of carved foam that looked like this:

You can see the mowing effect with the horizontal lines, but it’s a little unavoidable with that large of a bit, also strangely enough the top right to bottom left vertical lines are a little smaller here, unsure why since the model is supposedly 100% symmetrical. Overall, I’m proud that this was my first job on the router!

So this one was easy enough, I wanted to make a sort of strange objects with a lot of greebles, making it look like a space panel like a certain video I saw (See below)

A channel called Punished Props on youtube 3D printed and Vacuum formed this for another channel called Captain Disillusion , a VFX artist who breaks down scams and effects for his Flight of the Navigator Video.  So I was going to make some sort of ‘Power Generator’, like a flux capacitor, but eventually one thing led to another, and I was stuck with….

SPACE BUTTHOLE

But more importantly, a model I was pretty proud of to put on the CNC Router, and if I make one with a castable material, It’ll work!

4.2.1 Modeling with Implied Motion:

This post goes over Extruding, Sweeps, Lofting and Revolving, as well as some other techniques that I’ve actually used in fusion before (See the lightsaber project), and it’s mostly for non-organic modeling.

4.2.2 Mold Making:

This post goes over the caveats and techniques of mold making, lofting it and making it possible to not break or fall out. From experience, you can make single-cast molds out of a weak silicon to make practically anything, but the mold may only be a one-time use.

So for my model, I decided to choose the easiest thing I had on hand to scan that I carry everywhere: My Head.

To start off, the creality scanner spat this out. This model was pretty good! Though there were a few problems I needed to fix first, namely the flat part on the head, the mangled right ear, and the not-so-flat bottom section of the model. Simple enough for MeshMixer to fix with me

After a while in MeshMixer, I repaired the ear a bit, fixed the flat spot on my head (Since the scanner was having trouble capturing it because of the darkness of my hair and the lighting in the space) and added a base for easier printing. However, I was able to take advantage of something else in the space too, the Prusa’s color change feature!

So here it is! My golden idol of my own head! Printed at .1mm layer height using our Marble and Gold PLA filament, with a grand total of 36 hours to print.

So why pick my own head? I can scan literally anything using the Creality and/or photogrammetry. For starters, the source of this model is ME, so there’s no copyrighting or citing, and because I figured out the creality basically by myself, I was able to get a fantastic scan of my own head along with some other things in the space. Without that tool I most likely would not be getting as good as a scan as this.

So there’s not much I can say about designing my head, since this was sort of an alternate project, so I’d rather go over the creality scanner and my struggles with it instead, then write a small blurb about scan cleaning and printing at the end.

Is the creality worth it? I’d say yes. Its a very slow process, the software sucks, and the only documentation is in my head, but the scans are high quality.

Working with the scanner was pretty hard at first. When I first cracked it open, I was sort of amazed about how clunky the software was, how horrible the first scan was, and how tough it was to set up. It needs USB 3.0+ and wall power to even run, so it’s hardware and location locked, the turntable needs either a bunch of AAA batteries or to be plugged into the scanner itself, and the object choice was odd.

But eventually I broke it.

I got through creality’s stupid software, and through a few rounds of testing, I got a good scan off it. The soda can. It wasn’t on the turntable, but it was good to me.

The turntable issue was also resolved, doing the pear and removing the base, allowing the software to clean itself up, and exporting it, the pear model came out almost identically, +/- some polygons.

Then was the ambitious part. Using a tripod and staying a little late, I slowly turned myself around, scanning my head all around before I was left with a model:

This model was fantastic, mostly. The right ear was absolutely mangled, and it had missed a big portion of my head, which I had to fill with Meshmixer. For a first scan of a person, it was very very promising.

Printing was another challenge, I definitely should have used support material for the chin, and maybe selected something higher than 0.1 mm layer height, but after a day and a half of printing my head, I think it was worth it.

For our laser project, I decided to go with a harmonica (Not playable of course, I’d still prefer to keep my sanity.) So we started with the Orthographic drawings, making mine around 4-6 times the scale of the actual object:

After that, I split up the three views and threw them into fusion. By using both organic mesh modeling and regular modeling, I was able to get the model below with relative ease:

So the project was going great so far, I had mostly everything done! Time to go into slicer and actually cut the file. I was going to use a material called Masonite to actually cut out the harmonica, so I just changed my slicer settings.

And then it didn’t work.

I apparently didn’t use enough passes to cut THROUGH the masonite, so instead it’s just a bunch of harmonica-slices on a wasted piece of material. It’s a shame too because this stuff is dense and it most likely would’ve looked a whole lot better.

So after another wasted hour and a half, I did it out of cardboard since cutting every piece on the bandsaw just was not an option, and this time it actually came out:

And after some rigorous gluing and some patience, I ended up with my harmonica! Just a little bigger and unplayable, courtesy of our Lightbox here in the Makerspace:

Fabrication was pretty easy for me, I made my vinyls 2x2in, 3.5×3.5in, and the largest one was 7x7in.

So once I had that over and done with, I had to put it on something. I already made a ton on Vinyls, but they were getting old, peeling off the back of it and I wanted to update them anyways since I’ve had them since the first semester of class.

This was the main reason I made the Vinyl white, the white vinyl really does pop off on the back of my black laptop. even if it doesn’t follow every contour of the case. Some other things that would work here would be brighter colors, bright blue, teal, red, etc, but I think the white works perfectly, and the scanner really shows it.

So for the Laser Project, and the Orthographic drawing, I decided to choose an interesting, but somewhat simple object to play with.

An ‘American Ace Harmonica’ by Hohner. I was never good at playing the harmonica, but I’m pretty good at 3D modeling.

This was the ortho drawing I had, the Harmonica is an interesting model because it has a lot of holes, bends, and curls that you can’t really get to with just an ortho drawing. It was a nice concept, but again, I’m better at 3D modeling:

So after a class and a half of sculpting and modeling, I ended up with this. It’s not horrible compared to the harmonica, but a lot of the depth comes from stamping the lettering down onto the metal. Plus, since I was really modeling this off the Ortho drawing instead of the actual harmonica itself, quality will and was lost in the transition. Sure, it’s not playable, but if I really wanted it to be I wouldn’t be laser cutting it out of Masonite.