"Grgll grappa blerg stormpillow." - Crazy Dave
It is critical to always be prepared for the zombie apocalypse. And in the event of any cataclysmic event, more critical is it to have a means of producing power. Following the footsteps of my favorite wastelander, Crazy Dave, I wanted to have a Sunflower from Plants vs Zombies.
Instead of modeling a sunflower from scratch, I figured it would be more interesting to 3D scan an actual, living sunflower. So, I went down to my local flower dealer and got myself a beautfiul bouqet of sunflowers. Using Artec Leo 3D-scanner, I carefully took multiple images of the sunflower, which I kept upright in a vise. I noticed that the scanner was much better at capturing images against a relatively open and monotone backdrop, such as the floor of the CBA fab shop.
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Using the Artec software proved to be more of a pain than I had expected. Firstly, each scan that one took could be "fused" into a single mesh. I noticed that my first scan was more accurate than all the other supplemental ones combined, so I only needed to use a single scan. to facilitate the mesh process, I used a noise reduction feature to smooth the rough textures of the flower (0.1 mm filter). Thereafter, I used the sharp fusion feature to create a mesh. Although the smooth fusion feature is better suited to organic shapes, and it arguably resulted in a higher-fidelity surface finish, the smooth-fusion would not only take too long to calculate, but it would ultimately leave too many holes in the model. If I recall correctly, I applied a watertight-hole filling setting and mesh resolution of 0.5 mm.
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After exporting the mesh as an obj. file, I could import it into blender, where I used the sculpting tools to bend the stem and create the facial features: after that, my sunflower was ready for deployment!
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I decided to try three printer options: two copies at different scales on the Prusa, while one copy would be printed and processed using the form labs resin printer. As I suspected, the smaller copy was too small for the corresponding support material, resulting in the leaves being mangled. However, the remaining two prints worked quite well, rendering my sunflowers ready to rock!
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