We’ve been lucky to be involved in some amazing projects and this is right up there with the best!  Birmingham City Council approached us to see if we could help them out with their Chelsea Flower Show Garden this year that they’d been working on with former Play School presenter and now Baroness, Floella Benjamin.2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the Windrush arriving in the UK and so Floella wanted to celebrate the fantastic work the ‘Windrush Generation’ has done for the UK that she teamed up with our local council to put her Chelsea Flower Show vision together.  The garden was to feature a replica of the Empire Windrush, the first ship to bring immigrants over from the Caribbean to help the UK rebuild after the second world war.  To make it about the people, Floella and BCC wanted to make sure they were represented in the garden – and turned to us to see if we could help.

Of course, 3D scanning people is what our scanning rig was built for!

One hot Saturday morning our studio was filled with people ready to be 3D scanned.  Floella and the Council brought along some inspirational people with a connection the Windrush, some decedents from the original passengers, others part of the Windrush Generation themselves – everyone had interesting stories to tell.

The figures took a few weeks to process, complete the artwork and 3D print before they winged their way to Chelsea.

The Windrush Garden won an RHS Chelsea Gold medal, the icing on the cake!

After the Chelsea Flower Show, the garden’s going on display in Victoria Square outside the town hall before being planted in it’s permanent home in Handsworth Park.

(some images provided by Birmingham City Council).

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This year marks seventy years since a ship called Empire Windrush brought nearly 500 people from Jamaica to the United Kingdom. To celebrate this anniversary Birmingham City Council are creating a garden that celebrates the arrival of Windrush.

We’ve been asked by Birmingham City Council and Baroness Floella Benjamin to create 3D printed figures to appear on the back of a replica boat in the garden.

With the help of our friends at Capturing Reality we 3D scanned 30 people to be included in the garden. It’ll be on the Chelsea Flower Show coverage on the BBC next week!

WindrushGarden by backface on Sketchfab

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You might remember Aaron Frew as one of the Big Brother Housemates in 2015 – his huge personality being seen by thousands of people every night.  Taking part in Big Brother opened Aaron’s eyes to a future TV career, aspiring to be a successful presenter or host.  Over the years Aaron’s successful modelling career has seen him in magazines such as i-D, Vogue Homme Japan, Harpers Bazzar China and internationally in Calvin Klein’s iconic SS11 CK1 campaign.  Aaron is always seen on the London fashion scene at all the fashion week shows on on the dance floor at the after parties!

Aaron will be the first reality TV star to be joining ‘Star Shelfies‘, our new collectable celebrity figure website.  Fan’s of Aaron will be able to buy a little miniature Frew, to sit on their desk!

We took around 100 different scans of Aaron in various poses and settled on two that we’ll be launching with our new online store.  Here are the finished figures, ready for launch day!

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For their first ever exhibition, the New Scientist team invited us to bring our scanner along to the London ExCeL where we took free 3D selfies of the visitors.The event was attended by over 25,000 people and was billed as ‘the world’s most exciting festival of ideas’.  From the latest in VR to robot bar tenders there was a hugely diverse range of giant science fair projects!

I don’t think we could have guessed just how busy our 3D scanning rig was going to be – we managed to scan thousands and thousands and thousands of visitors over the 4 days.  Averaging just under 1 scan every 30 seconds.  Our stand was so busy that we had two developers hidden away in a cupboard scripting new code to move the data around even faster than we thought possible.  A massive thank you to or friends at fizzPOP especially @sepearson and @adamwoodall for keeping the rig running at lightening speeds during the show!

We came back from the show with terabytes of data and set to work on our high powered render farm processing the 3D selfies for the visitors.

Despite taking around half a million photographs in our 3D scanning photogrammetry rig, we were so busy we didn’t get chance to take any of the event!

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Earlier this year we were challenged by the popular television program ‘The Gadget Show’ to attempt to break the world record for the tallest 3D printed human. Naturally, not being folk that run from a challenge we said, “YES!”.

Presenter Jon Bentley (really nice chap!) popped over to our studio and we took quite a selection of 3D scans of him in our scanning rig before choosing his favourite pose to turn into the final printed figure.

After spending quite a bit of time with our artist detailing the final scan we ended up with a digital model we were happy with, so we started the long task of printing it in 3D.

The whole print took around a month to complete and is made up of around 30 pieces and over 50,000 layers – each around as thick as a single human hair!  Like our smaller 3D figurines we printed big Jon out in full colour using our ProJet 660 printer, so other than disguising some of the joins we wouldn’t have too much trouble making it look as real as possible.  We made the model hollow so it wouldn’t be too heavy and we’d be able to move it around without too much trouble.  The print itself is made from a composite containing mostly British gypsum then infiltrated with cyanoacrylate (superglue to you and me) to make it solid and bring the colour to life.

The bubbly Yue Xu brought a Gadget Show film crew along to capture the official Guinness World Records measurement and we held our breath while the measuring took place…

… We did it and are now the Guinness World Records holder for the tallest 3D printed sculpture of a human – measuring 2m 5cm!

Finally – we just want to say thanks to a few people for all their help and support during the project!

The awesome guys and gals at FizzPOP (Birmingham’s Makerspace (public open night every Wednesday from 7pm *cheeky plug)) for keeping us going during the late nights, early mornings and long weekends.

The Gadget Show team – Richard, Chris, Anton, Karen, Lucy, Laura, Mark, Gordon, Ben, Tim and of course Jon and Yue for their support and motivation throughout.

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We were delighted to be invited to Gadget Show Live at the NEC this year and we were thrilled to be awarded number 1 by the Gadget Show production team’s top 5!

Gadget Show Live is the UK’s largest tech event, attended by over 40,000 people each year!  We spent the week scanning visitors and of course took along our Guinness World Record giant 3D print of presenter Jon Bentley who was happy to pose for selfies with all the visitors!  It was at Gadget Show Live that we were officially visited by Guinness World Records and given our award for the world’s tallest 3D printed human

Don’t forget to tune into The Gadget Show on May 16th to see if you can spot us on the telly!

Here’s some photos from the event..

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When the Gadget Show got in touch to see if we were able to help them out with a 3D scan of presenter Jon Bentley we were happy to oblige!

Using our 3DFX scanner, which consists of 96 18 mega pixel DSLR cameras, we were able to snap a few scans of Jon for the director to pick from.  The scan was to be used by the ‘tech testers’ on their home 3D printers to produce miniature Jons for them to use on the episode.  We sculpted in a broad range of detail sizes, to put the printers to the test.  Finally, we printed out a mini Jon figure on our full colour, 3D printer.

See the full episode Monday 9th November at 7pm on channel 5.

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We recently had the pleasure of working alongside the Yogscast and Hat Films YouTube content creators to produce mini figures for their upcoming Live Action shoot.

Hat Films jumped in our 3DFX 360° scanner, which is made up of 96, 18MP DSLR cameras.

The each scan is captured in a fraction of a second and after a while processing, produces a high density point cloud consisting of around 80 million points which we can then turn into a 3D mesh.

We took our scanning team and our mobile hand held scanner to Yogs Towers to capture the Yogscast team.  Our mobile scanner works with structured light, taking around 10 photos a second.  The end result is a 3D model accurate to ±1mm.  We take some extra pictures which we can use later to add accurate colour and detail to the finished digital models

Back in the studio, when we’ve finished processing all the scan data, our digital artist gets to work detailing and putting the finishing touches to each of the models.

And finally, we’re ready to send them to our large full colour 3D printer!

Don’t forget to checkout the end results on the Yogscast YouTube channel!

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Along with our friends at FizzPop, we were invited along to exhibit and demonstrate 3D printing to the world of art at the mac in Birmingham.

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Our brand new 3DFX 360° scanner saw it’s debut this weekend at Insomnia 55 – the UK’s largest gaming festival!  Consisting of 96 DSLR cameras, our full body scanner takes 96 hi resolution digital cameras our new rig captures a full body scan in the flash of a light.

Thanks to everyone that stopped by at the stand and for putting the new scanner through its first big test!

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