Dinosaur scanned with DAVID!

[Simon]

Hello everybody,
I just want to present you a great project of the museum of natural history in Braunschweig, Germany. They have found a previously unknown species of dinosaur in Africa (Niger). During million of years the dinosaur bones have been deformed by the pressure of earth. So they have scanned most of the bones with DAVID-Laserscanner, then they have undeformed them with a computer and printed them in 3D. The results are very impressive.
Now the whole(!) dinosaur is reproduced and they can send the original bones back to Niger where they belong to...
The official exhibition will start at October 21th, in Braunschweig (Germany)

[Simon]

Some more images....

[RAYA]

Hi Simon

Would you please explain some about their hardwares and their configeration ?

Ray

[MagWeb]

Hey,

Achim's intersectionangle is much too low
Nice project! Did he scan all these bones in freehand scanning ?

Gunter

[Simon]

Would you please explain some about their hardwares and their configeration ?

Hi Raya, they use a monochrome CCD camera identical to that in our shop and a green focusable line laser.

Nice project! Did he scan all these bones in freehand scanning ?

Hello Gunter. Yes, he did! We suggested him to build and use a motorized laser or a video projector, but he was quit happy with the manual movement. If you have seen all these people excavating the bones dust particle by dust particle, you get the impression that time plays a secondary role.... But I think if he tries a motorized setup he will not go back...

[NoHumorMan]

What? They are scanning their pieces with light on? Or are the pictures just for show?

[hal]

Hello,

my compliments to Mr. Achim Ritter and to all the team of the Museum of Natural history.
This is a great and hard "table of tests" for David: and seems that the result is great!

I love this project, and I ask if we can know more.
Maybe a quick explanation of the workflow (process from star to end and possible problems) from the protagonist(s) of this enterprise, can be interesting.

Thanks to share these great project's infos,
best regards,
Mattia

[Simon]

What? They are scanning their pieces with light on? Or are the pictures just for show?

Of course not, it's just for a nice picture.

I love this project, and I ask if we can know more.
Maybe a quick explanation of the workflow (process from star to end and possible problems) from the protagonist(s) of this enterprise, can be interesting.

I only know that they scan the bones with DAVID-Laserscanner, then they undeform and postprocess the 3D models using e.g. Cinema 4D, then they send the models to a 3D print service, and at the end they colorize the printed bones manually. I will ask Achim if he can give us some more details...

[Khalid Khattak]

Nice Work

[WalterMo]

Have just visited the special exhibition „DINO“ of the museum of natural history in Braunschweig. It's very impressive to stand beside the skeletons of some dinosaurs restores in original size.
And of course I have seen the DAVID stand where scanning of a dinosaur's bone was demonstrated as an automatic repeatable process. The scanner was built by our well known Gunter (MagWeb).
As I heard from the scientists, the scanner was still running without any problems since the beginning of the exhibition.
And they told me that more than 20000 visitors had come in the first third of the opening time.

Walter

[MagWeb]

Hi Walter,

the scanner was still running without any problems since the beginning of the exhibition.

puuh ...that´s like one of these IKEA long time quality tests....thanks for the report!

Do you know whether they do actual live scans or some recorded (demo) loop?
If it´s real live planeless scanning (for the result seems quite good):
It would be interesting how many times they had to do a new fresh reference scan?

Gunter

[Simon]

Thank you Walter for posting the picture.
BTW: This reminds me that I also want to show two more pictures of the finished dinosaur in the showroom:

Hi Walter,

Do you know whether they do actual live scans or some recorded (demo) loop?
If it´s real live planeless scanning (for the result seems quite good):
It would be interesting how many times they had to do a new fresh reference scan?

Hi Gunter, first let me say thank you for your fantastic scanning rig!! It scans, and scans, and scans...
And it is live planeless scanning. The quality is very high. At first we made the mistake to put the rig very high on the tripod. Therefor we got vibrations due to the motor movements. After putting the tripod lower and more stable and moving the motor as near as possible to the tripods fixture, we got a very stable setup and the results gets very accurate.
We still haven't done another calibration nor a reference scan since the beginning of the exhibition. Ok, it might be possible that the calibration is not accurate anymore, which results in a slight deformation, but this is not visible for a visitor, and we don't have to fuse different scans...
Thanks again!

[MagWeb]

Hi Simon,

Since 21.10.09 daily opened 8 hours:
let´s say less than 1min/scan = about 500 scans a day * 40 days (until now) = 20*000 scanning cycles until now with the same calbration and motion.xml? The depth image looks quite like I would expect it seeing the bone. I would have expected some significant errors after such a time due to COM port delays or missing steps, for there is no physical endswitch built in .... But such errors seem to equalize each other...Would be interesting to see the mesh...

Hey, for such a long time test is a rare chance:
Could you save the same scan in some time intervals ?
We could finally compare the meshes and find a timeframe wherein this construction gives reasonable results.

Think that may be very interesting
Gunter

[WalterMo]

Yes Gunter,
This three month duty is a good test for your scanner. On the other hand it's quite normal that a stepper motor losts steps now and then. Specially when the microstepping mode is used.

When I visited the DINO exhibition with my wife I told her not to touch any bone of a skeleton.
I remember well this spot advertisement on the German TV of an insurence company. And, we aren't insured against dinosaurs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3hGqVpEX0
If in our case all the present visitors would have picked up a bone to demonstrate a common guilt? I think, not!

Walter

[WalterMo]

Now the special exhibition of dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum of Braunschweig is closed. More than 55000 vistors have seen the skeletons and how to scan bones of them by DAVID.

And the next exhibition is already planned for September 2011. Issue: Whales.

I wonder if then DAVID will also be one of the party.

Walter