I am a Buddhist monk given the job of making Buddha statues for temples around the world and I need help! Basically I have some existing statues that I can scan in using a cheap infrared 3d scanner (www.intricad.com) using software called TriAngles. I then wish to make changes to the 3d file and send for rapid profiling (I am new to these terms so please excuse my awkwardness with the terminology. I also have access to a program called ClayTools by Sensable that uses a phantom arm and am wondering if there is any way I can use this with the Blender software. Any advice as to how to get started would be really welcome as the learning curve is looking a bit steep from here - thanks
Your first start should be finding out what model formats the programs share in common. Most likely, these other two programs will give you at least one of the major Blender-importable formats as an export option. You may have to mess with a few formats until you find one that works perfectly (.obj is a good start), and (usually) if you can import a format into Blender, you can export it back out for use in other software.
As far as making the programs interact directly, that could probably be done with some sort of python scripting, but I am not the one to give you that advice…
Best of luck to you!
Hello.
I don’t think blender supports anything like the “phantom arm”. But I’m sure you can edit your model in blender. The most used format for transferring models between programs is wavefront .obj so see if your scanning software can export to that.
I had a look at the TriAngles scanner pages… it looks quite interesting. Are you happy with the results? There are a lot of tutorials about blender online as well. It really helps if you have very specific questions on these forums.
Good luck.
http://www.intricad.com/product.html
Yes you can import at least 2 of the formats.
There are good blender tutorials how to get started. Like this one http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
Good luck!