Digital Bodies

It all started out with scanning a part of our body. I chose my hand. For this we used an iPad with an extra camera attached. The part you wanted to scan needed to be in a little box. It sounds quite easy, but can be a bit tricky at times, due to the fact that the camera can happen to focus on to the wrong part.
The more accurate your scan is, the less work you will have later on, which is something I had to experience myself. I Imported my scanned hand into Meshmixer and was very happy with the way it turned out.
Unfortunately, I could not fix the holes and the Auto Repair of Meshmixer would not work either.

That is why I decided to work with a scan I made of Laura’s hand.
The scan was from the beginning on very accurate.
And this time Meshmixer would cooperate and do the „Auto Repair“ for me, which helped a lot.
It just so happened that one finger was scanned a little bit crooked, I fixed this by using the sculpt tools. Besides that I also smoothed out the whole scan.

Eventually, I imported this data to Slicer for Fusion 360 and cut it into stacked slices which I decided to turn into a 90 degrees direction and exported the data as a PDF file.

Next I turned my attention towards the laser cutter which I was using for the first time.
As a preparation you have to fill the laser cutter with material(cardboard), changed the settings to „Focus“ (direction between laser and material) and set the start point (zero point) for the laser.
After that I imported the PDF file of the hand into Illustrator and set up the settings.
In order to find the correct colour settings (Speed, Power, Focus) for the edges (blue) and numbers (red) some test cuts were necessary to find the right balance.

Color Mapping Setup:
Red color (for engraving the numbers): Speed: 100, Power: 25, Frequency: 50
Blue color (for cutting). : Speed : 70, Power: 70, Frequency:50

Do not forget to turn on the vacuum!
It took the laser cutter about 40 minutes to cut out all parts.

Lastly, I had to assemble all parts with glue. It took a while but I am very pleased with the result for doing this for the first time. The final product has a length of 36 cm, therefore it is a bit bigger than the original.