The award-winning television comedy, now a cult classic, was populated with unique puppet characters.  Producers wanted to create a collector's item of one of them.

The real robot puppet used for the show was over six feet tall, making a life-sized replica impractical and expensive to make, so the producers decided to scale the robot to six inches. The puppet itself was located in Minnesota, so the manufacturer, Bamco, searched for a high-quality 3D scanning company in-state to perform the scan, and found GKS Global Services. Using GKS avoided long-distance shipping of the robot and sped the digitization process. The GKS account manager discussed the project with MST 3000’s contacts and quickly moved into the scanning phase. It was important that the process be non-destructive because there was only one real puppet of the popular character. Because laser scanning is non-contact, the figure’s geometry could be captured without touching or distorting the free-form shape.

GKS engineers scanned the large puppet character on the Laser Design SURVEYOR™ FA Series 10’ Platinum Faro-Arm 3D laser scanning system with the Laser Design SLP-2000 laser line scanning probe, the longest-line (10”) scanner available on the market. The scan was done in a fraction of the time of shorter-line scanners, plus the accuracies of the long-line scanner (75μm) were high enough for this type of reverse engineering application.

The set-up and scanning process comprised two-parts. First, was to scan the whole assembled part, which took 1.5 hours to complete. Second, was to scan the four individual parts of the puppet, which took four hours to complete. The four parts included the top half of the puppet head, the bottom half of the head, the neck tube, and the rod that held the mouth in place. Scanning both the assembly and individual parts assured that all surfaces were thoroughly captured in the scan data. Because the non-contact laser scanning system projects a line of laser light onto all of the part’s surfaces while cameras continuously triangulate the changing distance and profile of the laser line as it sweeps along, the problems of missing data on complex free-form surfaces are greatly reduced.

The laser line moves back and forth over the part until the area is captured digitally. The system measures fine details so that the object can be exactly replicated in a CAD model. Laser scanners measure articles quickly, picking up to 75,000 coordinate points per second, and generate huge numbers of data points without the need for special templates or fixtures.

The puppet’s body had no internal cavity, therefore the scan was able to reproduce the entire part’s profile completely and precisely in the coordinate point cloud. The native software automatically connected the point cloud data from multiple views into a common coordinate system in a single scan file of the assembled puppet. After the scanning was complete, the raw data was processed and refined into a complete point cloud model.

The 3D point cloud data was ported into Geomagic Studio, modeled into a non-parametric solid model, and scaled down to the desired size. This allowed the manufacturer to make the molds as-is, without costly reworking, precisely preserving the geometry of the complex, free-form parts.

To complete the scaled-down figurine’s structure, GKS performed another value-added engineering service for this project: product design. Bamco wanted GKS to design a proportional base for the small figurine in CAD since the real puppet was just a head and a neck, no body, no base. GKS engineers extracted the dimensions of the neck tube rings from the scan data and created a coil of tube for the base on which the figurine stands.

The coil was designed only in CAD; no physical coil part existed. It was scaled to be proportional with the puppet head and neck and to function as a solid founda-tion, matching the size of, and stabilizing, the collectible figure. The professionals at GKS are experienced in these types of product design add-ons. The customer was extremely pleased with the results.

As expected, the laser scanning process worked very well in capturing the entire shape of the puppet and creating an accurate non-parametric model that was scaled down to the desired dimensions. This type of file format feeds directly into mold-making machines for easy fabrication. An extra value-added component GKS provided was a color version of the model as a native ProE file. In this format the customer could see what the scan data looked like in a more lifelike color version and use it to illustrate their product concept to their manufacturer and other stakeholders.

The project was quoted for delivery in one week. GKS delivered in less time, even though the coil base design element was added to the scope. “We appreciated the timely delivery,” commented the manufacturer, “and the guarantee that the deliverables were exactly what we needed.”

The CAD model functioned perfectly at the manufacturer to fabricate the figurine molds. The scaled-down puppet figurine is now available on the MST 3000 website along with DVDs of the cult favorite’s shows. GKS’s expertise in collecting and preparing scan data for reverse engineering applications sped this project to a successful conclusion.


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