Photo2Mesh Portraits

Very nice, I did something very similar recently of printing a topography map of my dad's farm.

I have also been thinking about using Facegen to make some busts. It can take in photos of front and profile and then generate an accurate head mesh from the input.

Very cool.

I was annoyed about the drag mark on Lily, since I decided I didn't want to smooth it, but the easiest way to deal with it is sanding.  Maybe I will sand down the background and brush it with acetone so I can leave the rest of the print alone.  The bottom left corner curled up on Zoe quite a bit, and a little on Lily.  I need to check the bed level since it was the same spot.  My first attempt was fresh hairspray on glass at 100C with the case heated up to 50C and it warped a lot.  This was also when I discovered that you can't use pause with SD, because that is a command for Repetier.  When printing from SD the PC host is not involved.

I flipped the glass over to the Kapton side and squished a little more and that confined the warp to a little corner lift.  Next time I will go really slow on the first layer.  The only other thing left to do is an acetone/ABS wash, but I don't want to stick too hard.

I tried this out a while ago in clear (posted around here somewhere), and it makes the detail a little hard to see.  White can be challenging because it tends to show every little problem in a print, but it is an advantage in this kind of print.

Threw this together in a couple of hours and it's only on the .3 settings (still need to replace that lead screw).  Not the best but a little smoothing would do it wonders.

I found a 2nd problem when running it at a higher detail, even if you do get it to save, is then slicing it can end up using everything you have.

Typically I cheat as I have a machine I use for processing everything more intensive than a quick render normally I throw and forget so was a bit surprised to find a job running for more than 15 mins and when I looked was using 28GB of ram. When i looked at the photo2mesh it had used 12gig so I'd be careful running anything with to much detail.

Outside this if you find it crashes is often the debug process kicking in as it will copy what's in the ram and nasty things can happen but keep in mind this only kicks in when it thinks theres a problem anyway. to turn off  control panel > action centre > problem reporting settings and change it to never, but keep in mind if you do get something go wrong in future you may need to turn this back on to find out what's wrong.

You can also up the priority in task manager but this is only processing not memory and unless you have something else competing for the processor time there should be no need to change it and even then i'd suggest turning the other thing off rather than playing with priority.

I'll post more of a write up later on this, but thought I would share the initial results of the project I've worked on with Photo2Mesh.  I was able to obtain a picture of Saturn with my telescope utilizing the eq mount that I made out of mostly printed parts back in July and August.  After cleaning up the picture and utilizing Photo2Mesh, I was able to make a cool litho with the invert option.  Using clear and translucent yellow as the first few layers and then black on top, I got a translucent image of Saturn to print out great.  I also designed a light box/frame so that the picture can be hung up and then lit up at night with a remote control, battery powered led light.

I've also been working on a picture of Jupiter I took and pictures of galaxies my dad took, but they have a little more work till they are what I would consider finished.  However, they still make nice window dressings.

I really love that I was able to create a device that allowed me to take these pictures with my own telescope, and then make such a cool object about 15 software programs later.  The full design I have will be a large frame of several planets, the moon, the sun, and some galaxies all combined into a giant light box.

This is awesome work.  Can you give us a glimpse of the equipment you printed to enable your tracking?  Keep up the interesting work.