There’s something especially satisfying about producing physical representations of text. It just scratches an itch. I have vivid memories of playing with colorful fridge magnets as a child — trying to spell out funny words and sentences. Here are some attempts at giving form to text.
A friend of mine works in a neuroscience lab and mentioned that she recently had an MRI as part of a study. I decided that it might be a fun exercise to convert this to a printable 3D model.
The standard file format for MRI scans is called DICOM. The first step that was required was to isolate the brain from rest of the bone and tissue that makes up the head. To perform the “skull-stripping” I used a program developed by UCLA called Brainsuite that automates the process.
The next step was taking the skull-stripped brain and generating an STL file. I used a program developed by Brazil’s Ministry of Science and Technology called Invesalius to perform the conversion.
I cleaned up the resulting STL to make it more printer-friendly. There were many defects in the resulting mesh which I used meshmixer to repair. This took forever! Although I was able to automatically detect and repair many of the imperfections, there were still quite a few that I needed to manually fill. I felt like like I was performing brain surgery!
Finally, the model was ready to be printed. I used my trusty Ultimaker 2 Go to print the finished product at approximately 1:8 scale.
And voila! It’s not every day you get to hand someone a model of their own brain. What a world we live in!
Assets: Picture of final 3D printed brain, screenshots/gifs of intermediate progress (mricron, brainsuite, invesalius, meshmixer, cura)
In Spring of 2017 I saw a reddit post on r/chicago that caught my attention: a 3D scan of the Museum of Science and Industry captured by drone and rendered with photogrammetry. I’d had experience with this workflow for a research project I did at Knox College a few years earlier, and decided to reach out to see if there was potential for collaboration. Specifically, I wanted to turn the 3D scan into a printable 3D model.
After meeting up in person at a local Chicago Virtual Reality meetup called ChiVR, Tyler and Ted from Helios Visions shared their data with me. 3D point clouds are not printable by default, but with the help of some software and light 3D modeling I was able to transform the scan into a “manifold” model that could be 3D printed. I used a Formlabs Form 2 SLA printer to create a tiny proof of concept:
Later that summer, I connected with the manager of the Fab Lab at the MSI and shipped them a printed model. Predictably, the team at MSI loved it, and was eager to find a way to use it for museum programming. They decided that the upcoming Spring Make Festival in 2018 would be the best fit for our project, and were open to suggestions on the best way to present it.
I didn’t have any experience designing museum exhibits, but I knew what we could accomplish with the tools that we had available to us, and I had an incredibly helpful resource in Senior Exhibit Developer Olivia Castellini to validate the vision.
We scaled up a version of the model that I’d already produced, and in the background a small fleet of 3D printers would provide a view of what each piece looked like as it was being produced. Each day a new piece would be added to the growing model, with the last piece being laid on the final day of the month-long Spring Make Festival.
There were plenty of technical challenges required to achieve this vision, but it all came together in March of 2018. Dynamism generously loaned three Ultimaker 3D printers and filament, the MSI staff took the pre-sliced models that we provided for them and set the printers to work, and thousands of Chicagoans got a chance to see cutting-edge technology in action.
The 3D model is now owned by the MSI and the printed pieces are stored as artifacts. I could not be prouder!
Epilogue: During COVID, our relationship with the MSI continued to grow, with Dynamism assisting in fabricating face-shields to be distributed to essential workers on the south side of Chicago. Additionally, I hosted a couple of virtual Junior Science Cafes about the project.
Bonus: Although we ultimately ended up leaving this on the cutting room floor, I worked with talented 3D artist Thor Man de Kook to create a Snapchat filter that places a virtual version of the MSI model into the environment.
