(Un)Printable

In a previous post titled “My Surrealist Object,” I discussed writing a program that would transform a user’s line drawing into a printable 3D object file. For my 3D Sensing and Visualization final, I decided to update the program to use Kinect data to create the 3D object. The user would wave a hand to draw.

It was more difficult to control the drawing aspect of the program because the Kinect often tracks before I am ready or continues tracking after I think I have sufficiently hidden my hand. After many tries, I finally generated an object that seemed printable. It was quite ugly.

object drawn with Kinect

Unfortunately, the Makerbot refused to print this object. This is probably because there were overlapping vertices. I tried fixing it with Rhino and other software, but to no avail. It was a nice experiment though.

View the code on Github.