I had a very fun time 3d printing my bro-skull scans from before my facial feminization surgery! I made candy dishes, keychains, and mailed one full sized from bone colored PLA to a friend as a joke.
One thing I realized on this plastic-wasting bender was that a CT-scan and 3d printer are basically doing the same process in reverse, with algorithms to deal with noise/errors/artifacts, taking a 3d form, making a stack of 2d images, inferring a 3d form from those images, and then cutting that into a stack of vector images in GCODE your actual printer traces out.
A part of me wonders if you could get okay results just feeding the original x-ray images as layers to an SLA printer with a specimen oriented in the scanner to not need supports. I’m sure that’s been tried at least once.
I had a very fun time 3d printing my bro-skull scans from before my facial feminization surgery! I made candy dishes, keychains, and mailed one full sized from bone colored PLA to a friend as a joke.
One thing I realized on this plastic-wasting bender was that a CT-scan and 3d printer are basically doing the same process in reverse, with algorithms to deal with noise/errors/artifacts, taking a 3d form, making a stack of 2d images, inferring a 3d form from those images, and then cutting that into a stack of vector images in GCODE your actual printer traces out.
A part of me wonders if you could get okay results just feeding the original x-ray images as layers to an SLA printer with a specimen oriented in the scanner to not need supports. I’m sure that’s been tried at least once.
Very cool! I might ask my dentist for my scans. They had my teeth printed by some lab then used that model to make my mouthguard.