For the last ten years, I have wanted to create a high-quality head and shoulder model of my wife, carved from a solid wooden block. The production of a sufficiently error-free 3D model of a real person capable of being provided to a CNC machine for 3D carving turned out to be much more difficult task than I expected,

I tried Photogrammetry, Gaussian splatting, and many internet websites to generate a good 3D model without meshing errors. I used X-box cameras, Raspberry Pi multiple cameras, and Lidar scanning to try to produce a high-resolution printable mesh.

A £500 commercial Pop3 scanner came the closest to a decent contiguous mesh. While this works very well on rigid bodies, memory limits resulted in incomplete meshes whenever humans were scanned. I note that, the recent £250 Creality scanner uses similar-looking hardware with presumably more memory. The scan of my daughter that POP3 did produce was good but I never managed to scan a full head as it always ran out of memory before finishing the hair region.

In the last few weeks, AI came to the rescue, and I have been able to print a 3D model of my wife’s head and shoulders. I started with the picture at the head of this article picture and used the website https://makerworld.com/en/makerlab/makeMyStatue to produce the following 3D mesh

The reulting rendered mesh had no errors whatsoever and had amazing resolution, see the details in the eyes and necklace.

Now with a reasonable mesh I used the Creality Ender 6 printer at the Makerspace to produce a 10 inch high PLA statue.

The next stage was to create a wooden relief of the statue. Here we see the the first roughing pass on the  X-Carve numerically controlled router.

Producing a final relief in wood. 

Making a cast of the PLA statue allowed Alan Green to create a pottery version

(Original small PLA version to the rear in white)

The final stage will be to find suitable wood to make a full size 3D statue in wood on the  X-carve. Watch this space!