The Use of 3d Laser Scanning and 3d Modelling in the Realisation of an Artistic Vision; Production of Large Scale Public Art in Tudor Square, Sheffield

The documentation of cultural heritage in 3D using non-contact laser scanning, and the wide variety of applications that the resulting data can be used for, are well documented. Increasingly, the 3D data is being used by artists, both in their work, and as a tool to realise their ideas. During recent regeneration, Sheffield City Council awarded the remit to design sculptural planters for Tudor Square, Sheffield to the artist Stephen Broadbent. Using the industrial environment of Sheffield and the natural landscape around the city as inspiration, the artist created sculptures based on natural pebbles and boulders. These hand-made maquettes were one tenth of the size of the final sculptures. From these maquettes, ten sculptural planters have been milled into natural stone. Computer aided design (CAD) modelling based on standard geometries was not appropriate to produce a data set which could be used in the milling process. Instead, a combination of 3D laser scanning, surfacing and digital modelling was used, not only to scale up the maquettes and create a set of files for each planter in blocks of size which could be machined, but also to facilitate later changes in the design to sections of each planter. In this paper we describe the 3D modelling process we undertook on the datasets obtained by laser scanning the artist‟s maquettes, and the preparation of the data for 6-axis computer numerically controlled machining.  Corresponding author