In article
,
Robatoy wrote:

On Jul 12, 12:49*am, Dave Balderstone
wrote:
In article , Rita and

Neil Ward wrote:
Fake, or something useful...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZboxMsSz5Aw

I have a Makerbot Thing-o-Matic. Very real. *I'm building a 3D scanner,
so I will soon have a 3D photocopy system...

What file format will you be able to export? How big an object will
you be able to scan?

For the printer, export as .stl, and then the printer s/w converts to
gcode for output. I'm not about other formats at this point, as I'm
still acquiring the pieces I need and haven't looked at the software
(Meshlab).

According to the documentation "Meshlab is capable of exporting the
watertight mesh into a variety of file formats such as .STL, .OBJ,
..PLY, .3DS and .U3D among others. This makes it a great tool for
converting your mesh into a format that can be imported into a 3D
modeling program such as 3D Studio Max, Silo 3D, Blender or to
integrate your file into .PDF file using Adobe Acrobat 9."

As for size I think "that depends". I've seen sample scans of people's
heads, and from the waist up.

The kit I'm playing with is "experimental".

You can follow the links from here
http://store.makerbot.com/makerbot-3d-scanner.html if you weant to
poke around and see what other folks have been doing with it.