Celtic3d teamed up with Make Aberdeen for an exciting project for Vattenfall and the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre.
Members of the public in the Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire area can personalise and create a complimentary 3d printed avatar of themselves. These will appear in two special exhibitions in February alongside a scale model of Vattenfall's innovative offshore wind turbines. The Wind turbine model (at the same scale as the avatars) stands at 3m tall!
The venues for the exhibitions are:
- Balmedie Library: February 1 - 10
- Aberdeen Central Library: February 13 - 22
The challenge
To design and build a system that would allow members of the public to customize a 3d avatar of themselves which would be 3d printed and displayed at two exhibition venues. The number of individual avatars expected would be a few thousand.
How we did it
Celtic3d developed a web service that can automatically create 3d model files from user input. Virtually any sort of customisation is possible, we can add or subtract shapes, apply colours, adjust scale and so on. Potential uses range from unique one-of-a-kind jewellery, functional items to more fun projects like this one aimed at creating public interest and engagement.
For this project, Make came up with the idea of a cartoon-like representation on a web-page and also provided the artwork. Through our 3d modelling services, Celtic3d took the initial artwork from Make and created a set of 3d components (a standard body, several hairstyles and colour presets). These components get combined in our system. Celtic3d’s systems turn the user input into 3d print-ready model files with all the colour data needed for the printing process.
With solid solutions in-place for the back-end processes, we reached out to a few sources for help with the front-end web form. The initial reactions (from nameless but well-qualified people) was that our idea was not possible and could not be done. Well, that provided all the motivation we needed. While front-end web development is not something Celtic3d typically do, there was no alternative but to roll-up our sleeves and fill the gap ourselves. In the end, this could prove to be fortuitous as we now have most of the work done to release a Wordpress plug-in that would allow future clients to do something similar from their own websites.
The overall solution works in sections. At the front is a web page with a form that users interact with. In the back, there is a separate set of servers that take the user input and create the 3d model files. Finally, the completed model files are loaded into folders where they can be downloaded by Make in batches ready to be loaded into their 3d printing system.
Because we plan to 3d print thousands of individually unique avatars, it was important to maximise the efficiency of the 3d printer. A lot of work was done by Make to figure out and test the optimal number of avatars to print in each batch. In addition, we also needed a way for users to find their mini-me versions in the crowd, so we used the same batch management system to send emails out to users with a record of their batch information.
More Information
If you would like further information on how you could use our customization capability in similar projects, please contact Gavin Bain (gavin.bain@celtic3d.com)