broken sculpture 3d cad model wysiwyg3d

The artist had made a maquette and originally wanted it 3d scanned and scaled up for for a much larger commission. The challenge started when it arrived broken.

Challenge:

This artistic piece was fragile and unfortunately, there is always a risk when using a courier or posting these types of pieces. It wasn’t just chipped either it was in pieces. The sculpture was handmade and had taken the sculptor weeks of time perfecting the piece for the commission – but now we were out of time. The sculpture had to be machined, finished and delivered. The deadline was looming.

Solution:

We could have sent the maquette back, there were multiple broken pieces but after taking a closer look at the handmade sculpture we noticed that the the breaks were clean and there was a possibility we could scan it after all.

Our arm based scanner was used to 3D scan each piece. Data processing took on a whole new meaning though as each piece was turned into a mesh and digitally put back together. Once together the part was ready for scaling up and machining!

Results:

The broken sculpture was 3d scanned and digitally brought back to life using the Geomagic suite of software. It’s not often the engineers get to be creative but we managed to digitally recreate the sculpture and meet the tight deadline.

For more information on 3d laser scanning or 3d modeling for your art or sculpture project Contact Us.