True Replicas: the objects

Together with Archeologist Steven Jongma of Delft Heritage, I sellected 5 objects excavated in Delft. They all date back to the 17th century, are made of porcelain and are manifactured in China, probably Jingdezhen. This kind of porcelain was made specially for the export marked, following the 'western taste'. Some are broken and restored, some are broken and just put together.

'Klapmuts': A-2-21, excavated in 1972

'Klapmuts': A-2-21, excavated in 1972

cup, DL 88 V15

cup, DL 88 V15

'Klapmuts' OLD 74-1-1, excavated in 1974

'Klapmuts' OLD 74-1-1, excavated in 1974

Bowl, V4/7, excavated in 1986

Bowl, V4/7, excavated in 1986

Bowl, V4/7, excavated in 1986

Cup with relief, OKL 3

Cup with relief, OKL 3

True Replicas: International Studio Jingdezhen

David Derksen, Hans van Bentum and myself will work on our projects for Museum het Prinsenhof at the International Studio Jingdezhen, run by Ryan Mitchell. The studio is situated in Taoxichuan, a vast area of the formal 'Universal' plate factory in Jingdezhen. This formal factory is tuned into a new centre of ceramics in the city, where artists studios, gelleries and workshops are housed in beautifuly restored factory buildings. Its a privilege and a pleasure to be able to work in this setting full of energy and vision for the future build on the old ceramic tradition and to be geast at the International Studio.

International Studio Jingdezhen 

Now (27&28th of August) on show at DROOG Amsterdam: True Replicas

foto: Jantien Roozenburg

The two projects presented here examine how 3D prototyping and virtual techniques can be utilised to bring the stories of our heritage back into daily life.

3D prototyping are emerging technologies that offer new possibilities to render physical objects into digital data and vise versa, such as 3D-scanning and -printing. With Augmented Reality one can add virtual layers of contextual information on to an object, that can than be discovered using an application on a smartphone or tablet.  With Augmented Reality, objects are enriched and transformed into information carriers that can enrich the story of an object beyond the walls of a museum, archive or a library. Bringing the story of our heritage to our kitchen tables.

The underlying questions we seek to answer with these projects are; What is the meaning stored  in  all these historical objects? How does the story behind an object change our perception and appreciation of that object? What is the relevance of these objects in our increasingly digital and virtual society? How are these stories relevant to us today? Augmented Reality and 3D prototyping offer opportunities to investigate answers to these questions.

foto: Jantien Roozenburg

foto: Jantien Roozenburg

foto: Jantien Roozenburg

CNC milling and 3D printing, by Kotryna Valeckaite

Today as a part of our minor our student group was introduced to CNC milling and 3D printing with Ultimaker2. Since we were free to choose the tryout objects, we decided on one of the .stl files we extracted from the CT scans. “Harry”, as our focus object, seemed like a great begin. Yet just after loading the files to Cura (the Ultimaker software), we noticed that the model was not completely straight. That was due to its original position during the scan. In other words, the object nested in-between two other objects was not completely parallel to the ground plane. This we tried to fix by manually rotation in Cura. In the end, it was not perfect and due to that the bottom edge of the cup was sketchy. Moreover, Ultimaker 2 seemed not like the right machinery for such task. That was mostly because we had many open, hanging edges and pieces which had to be supported. The latter is possible with the same material, but that leaves clear marks on the surface.

Removing support structure

Final product (1:2)

Parallel to 3D printing we also did some CNC milling. Just like in Ultimaker, we used “Harry”. For this production technique we used DeskProto. This program both translates the files for the machine and helps to create a frame for the object (mostly necessary to get a clear reference point). However, the latter can also be manually done in other CAD software.
Production of the object took merely 15 minutes, but we did not strive for the highest resolution. That meant that we took the biggest cutter available (d8mm) and got a sketchy cup with clear stepping. Moreover, due to the cavity in the cup and flexibility of the material, mistakes were made (seen in the picture below) and the model was very flaky.

“Harry” from foam (1:1)

Since we had more than 1,5h left, we proposed to make another model in CNC machine. This time to see how much detail we could achieve. For this task we chose “Hermione” as the model, yet due to the time limitations we could only take a piece of it.  We worked on the object from 3 sides, starting with 8mm cutter and finishing with 4mm. This procedure took at least twice as long as the previous one. What is more, during the first try the foam melted, completely destroying the model. In the end, results of the second one were not as clear as in the digital model, but still quite amazing: knowing that we used very soft foam, could not precisely put the model on the reference point and that we did not use the smallest cutter.

Foam “Hermione” (1:1)

In conclusion, the CNC milling could be an option for the final product, if we went for a single material transparent/translucent look. This would be possible by milling stacked and glued plexiglass. 3D printing in single material is also very interesting, but with this we would have to sacrifice some of the qualities of the end product (historical footprint, practicality, aesthetics).

Processing scans into 3D models (take 2), Kotryna Valečkaitė

As promised a day ago we would keep you posted about our adventures with image processing software. Even though we did not receive the trial version of Mimics, Avizo provided a very pleasing outcome and it also read .dcm files.
The program itself is very user friendly and incorporates visual programming with automatized properties, thus giving  the user just enough freedom to not crash his computer or make the process incomprehensible. In this sense it is very similar to 3Dslicer, yet Avizo has more options and more finesse in the details.
The final result is not yet perfect due to rather clear “stepping” in the final 3D model. This, according to our “informer” from the Industrial design engineering faculty, could be solved with Geomagic. However, now we can clearly state that the plan A mentioned in this post is actually possible.

Avizo interface

Detail in Rhino

Processing scans into 3D models (take 1), Kotryna Valečkaitė

Comparison of image processing software 1

Directly after receiving the scans on Tuesday we jumped into processing them into 3D models. To keep it clear we used “Hagrid”(obj. 5) as an example for all of the programs.
As noted in the previous post, this process has multiple steps and in order to gain the highest level of detail, a lot of tweaking is necessary.
The usual procedure goes as follows:
(0. Changing the .ima or .dcm files into program compatible format. Most of our scans were made in .dcm format which was not compatible with multiple programs: so far we tried RenameMaster, which did not work)

1. Loading the .dcm or .ima files into a 3D processing program. These file formats actually contain only 2D information: the sections of the object. In other words, the 3D model is an interpretation of multiple sections and therefore steps between them might be visible, if the resolution is not high enough.
2. Selecting threshold and filtering the right information. Depending on the program this step might be automatized. If not, it might be very heavy on your computer. Therefore, a device with a good graphics card and 16GB RAM is advised (it would work on 6 or 8GB RAM, but it goes slow and tends to crash often).
3. Loading the 3D file into a volume renderer to get an editable mesh (.stl). 

To begin with, we started with Seg3D. This program did not want to read .dcm files, thus we only worked with test files, which were in .ima format. The interface was clear, but to extract minuscule details it needed a lot of filtering and playing with histograms. That was extremely hard on our computers (6-8GB RAM, 2.0-2.03GHz) and took over an hour to get a decent file. Moreover, the final result is given in .nrrd format which later has to be translated to .stl with the help of ImageVis3D. The file looked rather detailed in Seg3D, but the final .stl was worthless.

Later on, we received a tutorial from an past student of our supervisor Maaike. It suggested using DeVide. Unlike the previous program this one works on the basis of visual programming. Thus all of the steps can be easily retraced. This program can directly export to .stl reducing the possibility of getting a very rigid mesh, like with Seg3D. Unfortunately, the program did not want to work on our computers.
After this failure we contacted one of the researchers in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. He adviced to try out the following programs:

1. 3D slicer (open source)
2. Avizo (paid, evaluation copy available after contacting the firm)
3. Mimics (paid, evaluation copy available after contacting the firm)

The first of the list (3Dslicer) proved to be very user friendly (although it did not read the .dcm files). The information is collected automatically after choosing a preset and is quite precise. One can also select if to smooth the surface: both outputs are interesting in form, with the edgy one as an expressive interpretation of a kitschy object of the past. If used for the final product, more mesh post-processing is necessary



To be continued…

Making Choises, by Jorinde Smits

Posted  by Jorinde Smits

We had to make some choices since there were  a lot of bowls, plates, hair brushes and other ceramics. To distinguish them we gave them names. We joked about ‘Harry Pottery’ and decided to choose the names from Harry Potter characters. We based our choices at differences of advantages and interesting characteristics. Since we didn’t know how much time it would take to digitalise the cups and plates, we numbered them in order of importance.
We took in account the different types of advantages.

1. Holes
   To make the cups useful again, we need to fix the holes.
2. Details
   Some cups like Harmione and Hagrid have some nice details. Since the CT scanner is not that accurate we have to find other solutions for bringing those details back.
3. Fixing techniques
   There are different ways used for fixing the objects. How can we translate those methods in our new design?

We decided to exclude the hair brushes in our process, because it has nothing to do with tableware.
1. Harry
Bowl with interesting holes the missing shards left. Diameter of +/- 15 centimeters.

2. Hermione
This one has some nice decorations. Diameter of +/- 12 centimeters.
 

3. Ron
Here the advantage is to replace the three separate shards. Diameter of +/- 18 centimeters.

4. Ginny
Small plate. Missing a piece and two repaired cracks. Diameter of +/- 15 centimeters.


5. Hagrid
Kind of fruit bowl with lid. It has nails and glue as fixing methods. The cracks are really fragile, but as good as complete. Diameter of +/- 25 centimeters.


6. Dobby
We liked this small cup because of its small hole. Diameter of 5 centimeters.


7. Snape
This one is familiar to Hagrid, but much smaller. The one defect is the bottom which is fixed. The cup is complete. Diameter +/- 15 centimeters.