Paris Lucke 3D Artist Blog: Scan the World Internship at My Mini Factory

In this post, I'll be talking more about my internship mentioned briefly in my previous post.

Who are My Mini Factory?

My Mini Factory are an online 3D printing community with a library full of 3D models covering all genres from, memes, fan art, upcycling, mini world (models of famous architecture), animals, festive decorations, demon creatures and probably anything else you can think of. Anyone can upload and download to and from the community, they use two terms to describe their audience:

Designers - the modellers who actually sculpt and upload the models.
Makers - those who download and print models but don't actually design or model.

They also understand that maybe artists don't want to give away their time, skill and talent for nothing which is why they let you open an online store. The catch? You pay $24.99 a month to sell and every sale you make they take 10% of.

What is Scan the World?

I was working for the Scan the World section of My Mini Factory, their mission is to make it free and easier for everyone to access global history and culture by bringing 3D printable representations of museum artefacts to the masses - and in doing so, preserving heritage. Scan the World is working to extend to places around the world. So far there is Scan the World UK, Scan the World India and recently announced, Scan the World China.

So what was I doing?

Scans rarely result in 100% 3D print-ready perfection. There were two types of scans I was working with.

Super high quality scans taken on an Artec Eva, taken when my manager visited Museums around the world.
Photogrammetry scans taken on camera, processed using Agisoft Metashape, sent in from the public.

For artec eva scans my job was to refine details using ZBrush that the scanner didn't pick up, so that when printed, the details would show. Also, for example if an artefact was backed up against a wall, the back of it cannot be scanned. My job was to use pictures online as a reference to reconstruct what essentially is a low poly blob and sculpt it to look as close to the original as possible. For the photogrammetry scans, I would take the images, run it through Metashape and export the mesh which I would also clean up.

I also learned how to use Autodesk Netfabb, this software is used to scale models using real world measurements, cleanly cutting the base of a model, run checks on models to see that they are 3D printable and corrects any errors. The models would then be rendered in Blender and uploaded to the website.

There were a couple times I went out to capture photogrammetry scans myself. I visited Christie's Auction house in London and visited Highgate Cemetery. If you're wondering why I went to a cemetery, I wrote a blog post about it here.