Creating a 2,000-year Old Beauty with RP
Non-contact laser scanning and 3D modeling software is used by researchers to create a 3D model of an ancient statue.
The 2,000-year-old Roman warrior statue unearthed from the ancient ruins of Herculaneum, Italy was just a bit too fragile to handle. Which is not too surprising, given that it was buried by the same volcanic eruption that wiped out Pompeii in 79 AD.
So researchers with the University of Warwick, the University of South, and the Herculaneum Conservation Project deployed rapid prototyping (RP) tools and techniques to reproduce an exact replica of the artifact, which is thought to represent a wounded Amazon warrior. “This was also my first project where I have reverse engineered a work of art, and the oldest ‘product’ that I have prototyped, except for a fossil,” says Greg Gibbons, a senior research fellow at Warwick who headed the RP project.
The team used a 7-axis Metris Coordinate Measuring Arm and a Metris ModelMaker D50 Single Stripe Scanner, a non-contact laser scanning probe, to gather the geometric data. Using Metris Kube software, boundary points were inserted to ensure surface definition; small holes in the mesh were filled using curvature analysis. A point cloud was generated with an accuracy of 50 to 60 microns.
To manipulate the 3D model, the scientists used Materialise Magics RP software. They hollowed out a 3-mm wall thickness shell to reduce RP build time and weight. They also created a hole in the base surface to allow resin to drain from the hollow part after construction. The RP model was constructed using a 3D Systems SLA 5000 system with Watershed 11122 XC resin provided by DSM Somos.
There are lessons to be learned by others who aren’t in the archeological arena. Gibbons notes, for example, that the difference between this and other RP projects was “a great deal of care was required to ensure that only the minimal amount of supporting was used. This was essentially down to experience as to knowing where support could be removed without risking a build failure.” He adds: “I guess the lesson is that the RP expert and the CAD guy need to talk to each other at an early stage to ensure that the data is fit for purpose.”
