Printing 3-D Replicas of Human Beings with a Home Brew Printer (Video)

When I bumped into Abram Thau at Metrix Createspace in Seattle's Capitol Hill, he showed me a few printed figurines, including a Storm Trooper (of the Star Wars variety), and I thought at first that he had printed them as duplicates of similar-sized commercial products. Not so: It turns out these are made-from-life, specifically from cos-players who have stood on Abram's human-suitable turntable (powered by a chicken rotisserie motor hooked to a 3-D printed pulley) while he scanned them in. Thau's apartment is practically shouting distance from Metrix, but that pulley was made on a large Deltabot filament printer in the corner of his living room. (A living room usefully cluttered with tools, bottles of resin, projectors in various states of repair, and more printed objects.) More interesting still, Thau's figurines are produced with a home-built resin printer. Resin is messier to work with than the filament feedstock of RepRap/Makerbot style printers (and the resin itself has a slight odor), but it allows different results. Overhanging pieces are possible without requiring elaborate support pieces built into the mesh, and the resulting product can be noticeably smoother than typical filament printing, though all 3-D printing techniques are getting better. Thau didn't buy one of the commercially available resin printers, though (like FormLabs's), but instead decided to build his own out of scavenged and off-the-shelf components. Budget concerns and improvisation rule the day (Thau is also a grad student, studying to be a middle school teacher): That means there's a book holding up the projector which is vital to curing the resin, and the printer's case is recycled from a previous one. The results look as good as the affordable commercial ones I've seen, and he's excited to teach others to make their own. Third-party resin makers and a robust market in used projectors mean that other hobbyists can follow his lead and turn their friends into figurines. (Alternate video link)

Comments

Could it be....

[Thomas Miconi]

.... that somebody finally found a commercially viable application of 3D printing?...

How many people would be ready to pay for a decent-quality figurine of themselves? Especially so at a special event involving costumes.

Re:Could it be....

[MightyMartian]

Fuck man! I'd pay a goodly amount of money for one I could plant at staff meetings. Perhaps it could come with an audio board that would sporadically spout out phrases like "Way to go, team!" and "I will reprioritize to make sure your issue is at the top of the list."

Re:Could it be....

[Thruen]

Seriously. I can think of more than a handful of Larpers who would kill to have one of these set up before or after an event so we can have figures made of ourselves in costume. Maybe offer a 1-inch figure for DnD!

there are many other hobby dlp projects out there

[bitflusher]

I have been looking into this type of 3d printers and there are many others. Most not as reproducable as the standard reprap fdm printers. This is why i am currently designing the reprap petri that will be reproducable when the design is done. Right now it is in early prototype phase and does not work.

Photographically "developing" each layer

[Grey Geezer]

instead of using a filament deposition strategy is brilliant! I was not aware of this method of 3D printing. I'm trying to figure out if you can easily port your 3D CAD models to this printer too.

Re:there are many other hobby dlp projects out the

[Bodhammer]

I just read your stuff here: http://forums.reprap.org/read....
Very cool! I'm looking forward to following your project. One thing I don't like about these is the cost of the DLP, it seems that whatever your save on the platform you have to spend on the DLP...