Plastic Comparisons and Artifacts for Project

This past week I met up with Emma Dietrich from FPAN and talked about fixing the low-resolution problem I was having last week. Emma also brought the plastic replicas from the original test set so I could compare them to resin, as well as the actual artifacts that I will capture in 3D and print.

The plastic models were left on their support structure to help me better understand the post processing that goes into cleaning the models after they print while also having another aspect that I could compare between the two printing methods. Once I properly clean the support structures off I will be able to compare the two sets more fully, however initially the plastic prints look much better than I anticipated and do not bare strong layer lines which is traditionally associated with FDM prints. The plastic prints are also lighter and printed in a fourth of the time it takes to print their resin counter parts. While I will wait until I can compare them more fully next week, there was already an initial problem with the tip of the arrowhead pictured below. The plastic tip seems to be thinned, hallowed, and appears as if it isn’t complete. This could be a problem during the printing process, a limitation of FDM, or perhaps damage the model sustained after printing. Ill be sure to reach out to see if holding sharp points on FDM is normally an issue.

                I received six artifacts in total to preserve with two of them being purposefully selected to be more complex and difficult to capture and print. The first four models I will focus on are the easiest to capture and are three arrow heads and a fishing weight for a net. All are straightforward matte objects which will help me start this project off by working out any remaining kinks as I start from the beginning of the process and progress all the way to printing the model off and cleaning off support structures. The two other artifacts are a sharpening tool that has a slight gloss finish and a conch that was used as a hammer. The sharpening tool provides an additional challenge due to its gloss finish which reflects light back at the camera and creates blanks spots In the model as Metashape cannot place dots in these areas because it cannot detect what is supposed to be in that spot. The conch shell provides a challenge because of its overhang but also its size. A model like this will require support structures throughout the overhang and will overall require more care throughout the printing and post process.  

    I went ahead and started capturing one of the arrow heads and by the time of writing this blog I realized a mistake I made that I will go ahead and display here. So far the model looked great but I failed to take enough pictures on a particular side of the model and it left a dead space of data. This tells me that I need to go back and capture more photos from this angle to fix this problem. However, getting the model to this point did not take long at all due to the time I spent previously working in the program.