Philo's LEGO 3D Scanner (Used for 3D LDRAW Parts)

[DLuders]

"Philo" (Phillippe Hurbain) recently posted his LEGO 3D Scanner on his Philohome website. As reported today on The Brothers Brick, gombort wrote,

"Did you know you can make a 3D laser scanner out of LEGO bricks and a few custom parts? Did you know you can then use your LEGO model to scan LEGO parts and turn them into 3D CAD LDraw parts to make virtual LEGO models out of?

"Phillipe Hurbaine (philo) is well known for his clever software, hardware, LEGOware and general LEGO-mechanical skill but I have to say his latest work just takes the cake. And as if making a 3D scanner wasn’t enough he has actually used it to model some LDraw parts."

The

shows a "Laser scan of a LEGO part using DAVID laser scanner":

Philo wrote on his website,

"FROM OBJECT TO LDRAW"

"Here is a very quick overview of the long and winding road going from physical LEGO parts to its LDraw model.

"Choose the part to model. Geometrical shapes are not interesting to build through 3D scan, the models created this way contain a lot of triangles so this process is best for organic shapes, as you can see in gallery above.

"The laser line on the object must be clearly visible by the camera. The part must be lightly colored and without patterns. Otherwise you need to "paint" it in white color. I generally use a chalk spray paint, but white tempera with a drop of detergent works too. You'll then need to carefully clean the object after scanning with a fine brush!

"In a darkened room, calibrate your camera (see details in DAVID manual), install the object on the scanner and start scanning. You will need to perform scans from various directions, to make sure you completely cover the object. Some areas not covered by scan may be acceptable provided the object is smooth there, the reconstruction process will fill the holes. Make sure there is enough overlap between scans to ease object reconstructions later. Save all the partial 3D views for later processing."

[Blakbird]

Philo rules. He has made more LEGO creations that have actual real-world applications than anyone I can think of.

[freakwave]

That is truly amazing! I saw it yesterday over at LUGnet and I was speechless! I would have never thought that the resolution can be that good!

Philo's ideas are stunning! ...and now more LDRAW pars will keep coming!

Great!

[Toastie]

Yeap, I totally agree:

It's not only that Philo is analyzing, measuring, and intrepreting his findings on the ultimate level; his IDEAS what to do with all that and his imagination are truly amazing. This is what a LEGO master builder is about. Good to know that he is around to push things to the very limit!!!

Thanks for sharing this, DLuders!

Best regards,

Thorsten

[technichead]

Very good idea just goes to prove of great NXT sets are

[rgbrown]

Very awesome! Parts scanned this way will be a great boon for the LDraw parts library.

It should be said though, all of the hard stuff here is in the computer vision components of the system - not the LEGO components. The NXT is just programmed to move the laser slowly. So you can't really call it a LEGO 3D scanner (and neither does he).

As an (almost) pure LEGO project, the probe scanner he built is pretty incredible: http://philohome.com/scan3d/scan3d.htm.