SOAP Discussions: Engineering
By Vincent Khau
Recently, I was kindly asked to do a presentation for SOAP (State of the Art Platform) by Sophie Neate, Nina Gilbert and her colleagues centering around 3D scanning, 3D printing, with a focus on engineering and the distortions that occur in the process of transforming a real-life model into a digitised file. This talk formed a part of their three series interdisciplinary discussions of topics from economics, meta-data, and identity, to text, Japanese screen culture, and engineering at the KINGS Gallery on Kings Street.
That’s me presenting! Not your normal lecture space!
It was a really exciting opportunity to be able to talk about a core technology to my work and share with an audience of artists and the general public the
wonders of 3D printing and scanning technology.
We started the discussion off with exploring the wide breadth of methods to obtain a 3D digital model. These methods varied from using existing online repositories like Thingiverse, Shapeways, and even the Smithsonian Museum where communities share their models and scanned data for everyone to use! Further to this, we talked about learning 3D modelling from scratch using a variety of online tutorials (or coming to one of my or Aliza’s ResPlat workshops) would allow artists to further edit these models are even build their ideas from scratch! Another exciting approach is to use 3D scanning and on the day I brought along an Artec Eva and did a small scan of Sophie to illustrate how physical information can be distorted through the scanning process. An example of this can be clearly seen in the following images where the Engineering Workshop scanned a 4000 year old Mesopotamian chariot.
Before…
After! Fully scanned digital model.
So what does one do when one has a 3D model? Well, why don’t we 3D print it! I had brought along an Up 3D printer and showed how designs can be quickly prototyped in a variety of different materials from plastics, to resins, and even metals using a range of different 3D printing techniques.
As a part of our discussion focus, we finished the presentation on how I had applied 3D printing to my engineering research in developing active adaptive landing gears. I displayed our group’s prototype on a rotating platform and showed that even though the parts had been 3D printed, they still had structural integrity to live up to basic engineering expectations. Further to this, by 3D printing all the parts, we were able to rapidly prototype various designs and accelerate the design process. The audience all loved the little prototype and came up to it after the presentation to engage with the model.
I’d like to thank Sophie, Nina and her colleagues for giving me the opportunity to present as part of their initiative and hopefully it has inspired the audience to engage with this technology!
