The Makerbot Digitizer isn’t the only desktop 3D scanner to enter the marketplace and, in some ways, it’s already lagging behind newer entrants. Last week, we covered the AIO Zeus combination 3D printer, scanner, and fax machine, which takes the technologies behind the Digitizer and the Replicator 2 and mashes them together into one powerful machine. And, though it doesn’t explicitly mention a fax function, the Radiant Fabrication team is proposing some slight modifications to similar technology with their Lionhead Bunny 3D Printer.
Founded by Nathan Patterson and Kevin Harris, Radiant Fabrication hopes to make 3D printing and scanning even easier with the use of their Radiant Li software. Li, using controls and a format similar to Minecraft, is a voxel-based editor that makes for simple and easy model building. Currently using silhouette scanning technology, snapping and assembling pictures from multiple angles, the Lionhead Bunny 3D Printer and Scanner can capture the contours of a 3D object and render a 3D model made from .5mm block-shaped voxels. The development team, however, is working on incorporating laser-scanning, as well, to make for more detailed scans. At the moment, the whole scanning process only takes about a minute, as demonstrated in the video below:
Radiant Li 3D Scanning from Radiant Fabrication on Vimeo.
If Kevin and Nathan – who sounds uncannily like the monotone Nathan Fielder of Comedy Central’s Nathan For You – can successfully launch their Kickstarter campaign later this month, you may be able to purchase a Lionhead Bunny for yourself at around $1,649, which, in itself, is cheaper than a Replicator 2. That’s a pretty good price for a printer that offers multiple extruders and a scanner with a 2 mm degree of accuracy.
And, before you say to yourself, “Radiant Fabrication needs to pick an animal. Is this 3D printer a lion or is it a bunny?”; take a breath! Haven’t you heard of a lionhead rabbit, which, according to Wikipedia, “has a wool mane encircling the head, reminiscent of a male lion, hence the name”?
Source: Marketwire
