3d portraits for the blind

I am working on piecing together a 3d printer, prusa i3, as some of you already may know. I will not be able to actually start building it until August/September... One of my motivations in building it, however, is for my mother who has been totally blind all of my life. I want to be able to print family portraits of my wife and kids, and possibly my siblings' families, for her to have. I want to know if anyone has successfully made a 3d portrait and printed it out in enough detail to be recognizable and how they have done it. I saw a thread some time ago about 3d imaging using a Kinect, but I haven't seen anything referencing personal portraits. I don't know if the Kinect would have the resolution to do that accurately, and I am sure you would have to have some support material for nose and ears, but I like the resolution of the Yoda's that people like to print out and would like for something similar in size and dimension to that... thanks for the help!

--Eric

Hello,
I have been looking at 3D scanning technology recently and checking out reviews. A good free option so I have heard is 123d catch by autodesk.

[www.123dapp.com]

It is free to use and all you need is a digital camera and a computer.

The hard bit i suspect is the subject staying still for multiple photographs.

I have not tried it myself but as it's free whats the harm in giving it a try.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/16/2013 08:07PM by stonefisher.

I really dislike 123Dcatch, because, there is a 'catch'. You have to be always online, it's some kind of cloud processing. Since I work a lot from a laptop on places where I have no internet, I cannot use the software.

Does anyone have an alternative for this?

Looking around I found a pretty active 3d scanning forum here: [www.diy3dscan.com].