3D Printing a Jack-o’-lantern Mask with Blender

Patrick Taylor used Blender’s motion tracker to reconstruct his face in 3D, and then continued to 3D print it.

This all started last year with the completion of my nice shiny new 3D printer and a well timed Halloween party for which costume was required.

At the time I knew very little about 3D scanning programs such as 123D Catch or VisualSFM but I had had a fair bit of experience with Blender’s internal motion tracker. This is often used for reconstructing camera motion for visual effects but it also produces a sparse vertex cloud for the tracked objects. To help the tracking, I placed a number of dots over my face which I then tracked and built a mesh around.

This took a few attempts but in the end I produced a result I was happy with. After this all I needed to do was a bit of modelling to add thickness to the mask, jack-o-lantern eyes and mouth, 3D print it in a few sections and paint it.