How to 3D print a 1 meter high sculpture [PART 1]

On March 27, 2015, in Łódź, a conference was co-organized by us and the Technopark of Łódź, entitled “3D printing – the future of industry”. To celebrate this event we decided to execute a large project, which could be used as good showcase for us. There were many ideas, some quite spectacular – though extremely difficult to carry out (for example 3D scanning and printing of… Tadeusz Kościuszko monument standing on 17 meters at the Liberty Square in Łódź). And as usually happens in such cases, in order to come up with one thing – we came up with a completely different, much cooler idea. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first episode of Teddy Floppy Ear (Miś Uszatek) – an all time famous Polish character of children’s TV series. His statue stands in Łódź. We decided to 3D scan it, 3D print in 1:1 scale, and donate it to a kindergarten. This day at noon, in the center of Łódź, at 87 Piotrkowska Street, the first installment of this event took place – the 3D scanning of Teddy Floppy Ear’s monument.

Teddy Floppy Ear’s monument is a part of a unique project “Fairytale Łódź”. A tourist trail around Łódź was created as part of the project, on which you can find eight statues depicting characters from children’s TV series by the Studio of Small Cinematic Forms “Se-ma-for”. The fairytale trail, besides Teddy Floppy Ear, includes other TV characters, such as Cats Filemon and Boniface, Plastuś, sparrow Ćwirek and Piotr and his dog from the film “Magic pencil”. Teddy Floppy Ear was the first of these monuments. He was, unfortunately, maltreated by fate – in 2010 he lost his paw (severed most likely by a working snowplow), then he had to hide inside the Tourist Information Centre of Łódź because of the renovation of Piotrkowska Street. On May 20 last year, Teddy eventually returned to his place, after being thoroughly cleaned, patinated and equipped with a new, shiny nose.

The monument of Teddy Floppy Ear plays a very important role in the lives of young residents of Łódź. No child walking down Piotrkowska street with their parents will do without visiting Teddy and rubbing his nose. This is why the creation of its full-size copy would be a huge attraction for children.

The first stage of the project was to scan the monument. To collaborate on the project, we invited Mariusz Szymbora of the DIM-CAD company, who worked with us on the famous project of 3D scanning and printing of our friend Ewa’s head. Like before, the scan was performed with professional equipment – HDI Advance R3X – white light optical 3D scanner, with a resolution of 2.8 megapixels.

At the beginning the statue was covered with a layer of special powder, which eliminated light reflections. It attracted enormous attention of the gathered photojournalists as Uszatek changed its color to white. This was met with rather mixed feelings of others Łódzians though. Having no knowledge of the event’s aim they were most surprised at this change.

The scanning process itself was quite long and tedious. While the body of the statue itself was scanned rather quickly, considerable time had to be spent on scanning the numerous details found on the pedestal (such as a backpack the Teddy holds in his paw, or an open book).

After over three hours of work, we had to clean the powder off the monument. As a result, we washed it so thoroughly to make him look like new, certainly much better than before the scan 🙂

At the time of this articles original publication the 3D scans were put together, the project was smoothed (the original statue has a few wrinkles, blemishes and small holes) and optimized for 3D printing. Later it would be cut into pieces and printed. We are going to present the first version of the printed Teddy Floppy Ear in 1:3 scale during the conference. The final version should be ready in a few weeks.

We will also announce the details of the contest for kindergartens. We can already say that it will consist in performing of the series’ opening song by the children of each kindergarten. The main prize in the contest will be the printed statue of Teddy Floppy Ear in 1:1 scale, while the children coming second and third also will be awarded.

Until then, you can start training the song…