Working with log discs and 3D scanning

Things You've Made
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I’ve been making things with these discs of Walnut for a few years…

Damn near killed myself cutting a disc on my big Laguna 18" bandsaw one day, so I bought a sawmill :). We have a lot of trees, so a good investment.

Anyway. I used to surface them with a thickness planer, but feeding endgrain hardwood with no flat surface through that tool was also fraught with Danger and Damage.

Et, voila! Fitted out the Primo with a 1" surfacing bit the other day and it did fine job of flattening, surfacing, parallelizing. Most pleased.

Nota bene: it’s slow to do this with a wood like walnut. I was shaving off 0.5mm per pass with a pretty respectable feedrate and maybe 5mm of overlap. Be patient.

Now I’ve decided to make a bowl/serving tray shape that follows the contours of the wood.

Took a picture, and spent a day trying to get Photoshop or Illustrator or Fusion to correct the perspective so I could draw an accurate spline around the edge. Got sort of close with Photoshop perspective warp, but not close enough. No dice.

Then remembered that Revopoint 3D scanner I got from Kickstarter a while back that arrived right before we went overseas and hadn’t even opened yet.

Oh, yeah. That worked. I probably should have attached the piece to a square board before scanning. I might still so I have a good way to register the position.

So now I can draw a spline that follows the edge. Next step is work out how to carve a bowl shape with crazy organic edges using Fusion and ESTL.

Any tips?

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I’ve done some “organic” shapes in Fusion 360, but, since I do them so rarely, I’ve never gotten very good at any of the approaches. My first choice would be a loft. Because of the way my brain sees the loft, I’d model the negative space using a loft and then cut the bowl from a modeled blank.

Another way I’ve played with (and had some success) is to roughly model the item in Fusion 360 then move the result to ZBrush Core to smooth and create the fine detail. The idea of this workflow came from this video. ZBrush Core runs $10 per month.

Ther are other Fusion 360 approaches that will work but may have steep learning curves. You can use lofts with the surface workspace to construct the bowl, or you can use Fusion 360’s sculpt environment to model the bowl. If you bowl was going to have a flat bottom, you might get away with sweep.

BTW: My method of scanning in shapes is to use a flatbed scanner. If the item is larger than my bed, I’ll do multiple scans and reassemble the whole shape in Photoshop.

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Yeah, flatbed works great for smaller things.