I’ve recently been experimenting with scanning items and people in an app called “Metascan” so it can be done on your mobile phone rather than paying £1000’s for a scanner.. however, it’s not as detailed as you may imagine. I’ve done a few but so far, these are the only 2 scans I have printed. the first is of my son, Alex in his Air Cadet unit form. It effectively takes - number of photos as you walk around an object (or for smaller ones the phone can remain still and the item rotated on a turntable.) in this case With a 5ft human, it was stitched from 201 photos. https://youtube.com/shorts/bRwxNFzXC_c?feature=share The other model I have made is of a Sack barrow which was 81 photos. https://youtube.com/shorts/wMS8hvy6kCc?feature=share once these are processed, you can choose a number of export options. So your file is ALMOST ready to print.. except it’s hollow and to full size. So you need to import in to “Meshmixer” on your computer and make it solid. This fills the “photo thin” outline as essentially, that’s all it is, a mesh outline. There are a few tweaks at this point in the program that I have not fully tried to use, so have gone fairly basic with the models, but depending on the power of your computer could produce different results.. obviously the next thing to do is to scale the model to whichever size you are printing.. I actually did the figure in OO and O and use an on line website that has a conversion system to rescale - http://www.scalemodelersworld.com/online-scale-converter-tool.html which is really good as there are a number of ways to go about working out the ratio or size your model needs to be. once done, it’s off to the support program, my preference being Chitchubox, and then that saves your file for your printer to print.. after printing its back to the usual routie. Ipa rinse, water rinse, dry remove support and then the UV cure. the sack barrow And compete two OO figures of Alex an O gauge model of Alex and once dried and UV cured.. For anyone interested, I will be looking to do some kind of speeded up video of a future scan showing how it all takes place.
