OWL SCANNING / MACHINING

While I worked at Streamline Automation, we occasionally took on one-off projects. The most challenging one that I was assigned was the enlargement of a small clay owl maquette into a 6-foot sculpture for a Hard Rock Cafe.

The maquette, created by an artist hired by our client, and perhaps a foot tall, was a minefield of undercuts and inaccessible areas.

A simple rotary laser scan was the first step in producing a 3D CAD file of the piece.

I had to get creative to scan some of the more inaccessible areas on the maquette.

Eventually, I merged 9 different scans into a single mesh model, which was then merged into a single object and optimized (“decimated") to reduce file size without sacrificing detail.

The resolution of the scan had to be fine enough that the model could be enlarged roughly 6 times without showing faceting.

With as many undercuts as the CAD model contained, the part would have to be split into a number of pieces to be machined.

For example, the wings, tail, talons and perch, and the top of the head were separated from the main body of the model, leaving a roughly cylindrical form with few undercuts.

The cylindrical geometry allows the main body portion of the full-size sculpture to be made in much the same way that it was scanned: using the rotary 4th axis on the Streamline FROGMill.

Elements like the wings and the top of the head were milled using a traditional 3-axis approach.

The talons and perch were created using two 3-axis raster toolpaths, milled from both sides.

Once all the various elements were machined and assembled, it was time to pass the project on to my co-workers for finishing, hard-coating, painting, and shipping.