Hopefully to motivate people (or Shapeways) to help with my "hollow stl" problem, I have to let you all in on something great. For the past couple months I've been playing with Photofly software from Autodesk which is now in beta testing (and free) as 123d catch Basically, you take 20 or 30 photos of something and it generates a mesh and texture and it WORKS GREAT! It really is amazing and game changing.
No more laser scanning. No more expensive scanners. A digital camera is all you need. With this software, anyone could take 30 pictures of something, do a little processing, send it off to Shapeways and receive A COLOR 3D COPY OF THE THING IN TWO WEEKS. Yeah. Wrap your head around that one.

A really important piece of software that Shapeways might want to consider developing in order to tap into this is a "thicken mesh" feature. This is a big one. With meshlab, for example, you can take your scanned head, say, and make it water tight and transfer over the nice texture that Catch gave you. This way you can print on a color printer your super accurate and realistic head in color with the texture. Problem is, you pay a fortune because a head is a big solid thing that uses tons of material. You really want a hollow head but it's actually a bit complicated to do this. If you guys could include something to do this, you'd open up a world of possibilities. Really. It would be huge.
Here are some pictures. The two heads are from busts in the Met in NYC. The female is an obj file with texture not yet watertight. The male is watertight and ready to print. And the lamppost is a photo of the real thing and a generated stl.

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[Updated on: Fri, 11 November 2011 20:07 UTC]

Here are the other pictures

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One more

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[Updated on: Fri, 18 November 2011 15:01 UTC]