Indian architect Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi has taken the illuminating practice of light painting into the third dimension, 3D printing with light. By substituting filament for LED lights and capturing the resulting print with a video camera or long exposure photos, Kalsi is able to produce 3D light objects.
Over the last year, Kalsi has amped up his light printing so that he can print in full color, along with other advances. Kalsi says he has “attached a 5mm RGB LED to [the] micro platform of my 3DR delta using a proper attachment. The RGB LED is attached to pins 4,5,6 on the Ramps board.” He also programmed his camera so that it starts and stops automatically, preventing the need to to hold down the shutter release button for extended periods of time. Using an Opto Isolator, he attached one of the Ramps pins to the shutter release button, which allowed him to capture a 3D scan of his daughter’s face and then 3D paint it with light.
The automation of the camera was a big step. Once Kalsi figured that out, everything else began to fall into place. The next step was producing Gcode for all of the different angles of the face model. Kalsi built a rotating .GIF file of the scan in order to work with the ten different angles of his daughter’s face. The custom Grasshopper 3D script he wrote can take any 3D model and convert it into Gcode (check it out here on GitHub). The Gcode script is responsible for controlling the path of the LED and also turns the light source on and off, so it is important to get it right.
In his experiments, Kalsi used a NIKON D3100 camera and set it to take long exposure photographs, but, for him, having a still image of the final light print wasn’t enough. It is the process of printing with light that is so fascinating, not just the final tron-like image. Kalsi used video to capture the entire print process, which you can see in the short film below:
