Laser cut 3D model of my daughters head

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Hello!

My 14 year old daughter had some art homework to do and she foolishly asked for my help.
She decided she wanted to make a self portrait in 3D…

We took a bunch of photos of her head from various angles and fed them into some photogrammetry software which (with some tweaking) produced our initial 3D model.


We used several other bits of software to edit the model and clean it up a bit. Once we were satisfied with the model we sliced it up into 200+ layers using some more 3D modeling software,


We called a load of commercial printers in south london until we found one who was generous enough to give us loads of 1.5mm corrugated card for free.

My daughter couldn’t use the laser cutter at her school (it was having technical difficulties and it’s really small anyway) so we started to google and phone around. We found the makerspace, headed down there, met the immeasurably helpful Jonty who kindly assisted us with the laser cutting…


My daughter assembled the thing using watered-down PVA and 3 thin rods as locators to keep all the layers aligned.

I think it looks hyper cool and I’m extremely proud of her…!

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Very cool

That looks brilliant! @jascha I would be very interested to learn how to do this, (especially all the software stuff which I am really not clued up on) if you ever wanted to give a demo or workshop or had the time to show me.

Like it! I did something similar with my MRI scan

Hi Beth, and thank you very much! I’ll pass your compliment on to my excellent daughter!
I would happily give a demo/workshop but I am not yet a member (I have to wait for an email), so I don’t think I really have access to the space…
Also, I don’t really have a functioning laptop so all of the software is on a tower/pc at our house.
If you (or anyone else) wants to understand how it was made then I’m happy to show you the whole process at our place (in Telegraph Hill, New Cross). Alternatively, I can answer any questions about the process or the software via email or phone.

Hi Rich, and thanks.
Love the MRI scan coasters…! (how many layers/slices were there on the CD?)

I think they take one every 1/2mm

Sadly only the top part of my head. The bit where the brain is (or should be…)

A+ for the art project (it looks fantastic ) Brian D=

Did you manually nest the profiles using rhino or did you use some grasshopper to automate the layouts? FYI using the mesh in slicer for fusion 360 will allow you to easily create the same effect and vary thickness of material and layout according to your material stock… great work though! Thanks again to @Jonty_Bottomley for always being so helpful… :+1:

Hi Jonathon, yes I did do it manually. Thanks for telling me about slicer, I don’t have fusion 360 but that looks very handy. Something to bear in mind for future projects.