[MUSIC] Hi, it's me again. Here today in Chicago, Illinois, the greatest city in the world, we're in front of the Art Institute in Chicago, which is Chicago's premiere art museum. Now one of the amazing things about 3D printing is that in addition to turning your ideas into objects, with the use of 3D scanning technology, you can turn your objects into ideas, and back to objects once again. So, for example, this lion, which stands guard in front of this building, was scanned using nothing more than a common smartphone. Posted on Thingiverse, and through 3D printing technology, we animated it back into an object once again. And printed in our lab. Objects into ideas, back into objects. Today we'll be talking with a fellow named Tom Burtonwood. Tom's a local Chicago artist and one of the world's premiere 3D scanning experts. Tom's going to talk about how we scanned this lion, some of the other work that he's done, and give us some tips for how you can turn your objects into ideas, back to objects again. I see Tom now. >> Hey, how's it going? >> Tom, good to see you again. Thanks for joining us. >> Of course. >> So you're one of the world's leading 3D scanning experts. >> Thank you. >> You're going to show us how you took this lion, and turned it into a 3D scan. >> Yeah, I'm going to use my digital camera, or I could use my smart phone. We're going to take a whole bunch of photographs of the lion from all different angles. We're going to upload that in the internet, it'll print a 3D model and then we can 3D print that. >> Great, show us how it's done. >> Okay. >> So, the important thing when you're trying to do a 3D scan using this method of digital photogrammetry is to make sure that you gotta nice overlap in photographs. You want to sort of move around and sort of segment it, so just kind of move the feet like so. I often tell people to think about yourself like a satellite. So you've got a planet and you're orbiting the satellite. You want good light, you want nice, even light. You don't want it to be strong light, overcast or kind of grey sky is a good sky. You want to use auto focus. I find that a DSLR is the best camera to use. I shoot with a five megapixel JPEG. Now with a piece like the lion, one other important thing is to try to get above the lion. So going up onto the steps and photographing from above will get the top of the tail, the back, and the head, and I'll go do that in a minute. Also it's important to think about the spaces inbetween the legs and between the base. As I said, don't worry about people in the shot because the software will ignore those except for people who are in the shot in the same place for like 10 to 15 shots. With something like the tail it's important to get a couple of good shots of the tail, and then also thinking about the face. Just get a couple good shots of the face and you should be good. This is not the easiest thing to scan, but if you try and look where the errors are happening and maybe come back and get more photographs, then you should get a good result. [MUSIC] I got into 3D scanning around the beginning of 2012. I was messing around with a lot of the infrared technologies, using the Kinects, and I started playing with 1, 2, 3D catch photogrammetry. And I did the makeup art, sponsored hackathon at the Metropolitan museum, the Met 3D. And I came back to Chicago, and wanted to scan some things that were kind of cool and interesting. And I felt that the lions would be a good sort of iconic project. I'm really interested in the sort of facade, or the idea of artifice in 3D scanning and like is it 3D scan? Is it the thing itself or is it a representation of the thing? And so, as an artist, that's really where I'm locating my own sort of practice. And sort of in this kind of limbo, kind of gray area between representation and real. And so I look for things to scan that sort of really reference that. So that's why I sort of move towards ornamentation and sort of decorative works. So for instance, I've just done a project called 20 Something Sullivan of architectural ornament by the architect Louis H. Sullivan. And that was working with Tim Samuelson in the city of Chicago. And we 3D scanned from his collection of original Sullivan Ottoman from buildings here in Chicago that have been demolished. And then made all those scans available, put them back in the public domain, put the book in the public domain. It's sold on Thingiverse, you can download it and 3D print it yourself. And so really just think about the idea of an architectural reference book, which is a fairly sort of common, sort of solid idea within architectural education communities. Say, and well, if I can make a book in 2D with photographs, why can't I make a book in 3D with surfaces and actual in relief? So I'm really looking for ways in 3D scanning to look at the world around us. Whether it's a piece of sculpture that's sort of really kind of prominent and iconic or whether it's something really simple and sort of mundane. As like a surface of a sidewalk or the side of a building. And looking just for texture, I'm looking for kind of richness, sort of visual information. And then using the 3D scanning process to extrapolate that and pull it from reality, quote unquote, and then think about how to then refabricate those things as works of art. Well, I think people are quite amazed by the process. I mean, I think that they find this notion that I can take a whole series of photographs of an object and use some free software that's on the Internet to essentially stitch those photographs to create a 3D model. I think that's a bit of a paradigm shift. I think it's a little mind blowing for a lot of people. I mean, I think there's an immediacy to be able to take a photocopy and an X-acto knife and cut it out and rearrange that with something else and glue it to a piece of paper. So I think with collage in a very physical sense, there's an immediacy that we're not quite at yet with 3D scanning. I mean, there's a quite a process to scan the image, process the scan, manipulate it in CAD, take that manipulated thing and then join it together, or mash something up. There's still quite a bit of work involved there. So I think that's a distance thing. And maybe as software improves, that gap will collapse. And maybe not, it's hard to say. Well, when I teach 3D scanning, and I do a 3D scanning workshop, it's usually I would say, about a five to six hour process of spending a little bit of time explaining what we're going to do. Of going out and doing some scanning, of coming back to the classroom and processing the scan, cleaning the scan up, and then having a file that's ready for 3D printing. Once you get into more advanced stuff like taking a scan and combining it with another scan, or creating something in CAD yourself and then combining the scan with that, or thinking about CNC milling or other kind of outputs. Then you start adding time in. I mean, I think it's like any skill set or any software. It's just how much time do you want to invest in the process. Does the process speak to you? Do you think it's something that's going to be useful to you? If it is, then you're looking at some time to learn it. Definitely, no question. I mean, I think that there's a whole range of different scanning technologies that are becoming much more available. But just the photogrammetry, the digital photogrammetry method, the algorithms have clearly improved. The software, the auto-desk recap, the algorithms seem to be much better with that. It's less photographs. It's less post-processing. It's certainly getting better, no question. And things like the infrared scanning, using the Kinect. Or now the structure scanner, those have become much better as well. So I think we're seeing a sort of eco-system with 3D scanning that's much, much more accessible. So I think one of the interesting things I just saw on the Internet was that the Lidar scanners are becoming much more affordable, the chips themselves becoming much more accessible. So I think we'll start seeing Lidar scanners in drones and other automated kind of equipment. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting about 3D scanning is that it really starts to come back to computer vision. And so it's about being able to turn the world into sort of three dimensions and how that relates to robotics and drones and things like that. I don't know, I mean one of the things to remember about 3D scanning for, say, fabrication is that ultimately were taking the point cloud that's generated from the scan then turn it into a mash. And then that mash is what we manipulate in CAD. There's still a bit of a distance between that mash and CAD that you might do in, say, Rhino and in AutoCAD. And I think that as that gap begins to close, that'll make things much more accessible. Yeah, so I don't think we've had quote the buy-in that we've had from smartphones, and from other sort of image manipulation devices. I think people, it's really interesting because, we're a very image focused sort of society, or a kind of civilization in a sense. How things look and how we perceive them to be, almost seem to be more important than an actual representations of the things. And I don't know if that's going to change. I mean, it's like I sort of imagine if I had a whole bunch of 3D scans of friends and family, rather than photographs of friends and family, I'd have this kind of sculpture garden in my living room of all these kind of miniature statuettes. And that kind of gets a little weird at a certain point. Whereas, if I've got a whole series of photographs on my iPhone, I can show them to somebody, and it's no big deal. So it's sort of like, do we want to have all these representations around us in a sort of physical form? And so, I don't know, I mean 3D scanning could, I could see very easy that 3D scanning sort of remains an industry, or it doesn't get the mainstream kind of thing that, say, Instagram gets. I don't know, I could be wrong. [MUSIC] [SOUND]
