Enzymind Labs

I've had a hankering to make a bronze casting from an MRI of human brain for a long while. Recently a sculptor friend, Pete Helzer, contracted out a many-copy job to a sandcaster (who I haven't met) who recently acquired a high end (~$30K) 3D printer (uses a hardened plastic medium, no more info) capable of doing brain size work. I had talked to Pete about 3D printing and brains so he's interested. I'd like to get good at optimizing 3-D meshes for this kind of reproduction: in particular creating arbitrary shapes with my own software, and using commercial tools to tweak the meshes.

I have several suitable volumetric brain data sets. The first task is to extract from raster volume data a thin shell polygonal mesh, and write that to a suitable file format.

I will need to do some manual work editing the extracted surface to get the final files.the printer can convert/read.

Once it is printed, it will be cleaned up (filled/sanded/tweaked), and Pete has the know-how and technology to do a rubber mold, from which wax positives can be made. These will be cast in bronze using the lost wax process utilizing a plaster mold.

I'm hoping to do this for each of both hemispheres of an anatomically correct volume file. The rubber mold is durable enough that several castings could be made. I'm also interested in a ~1/4 scale mold with which to try casting a brain with crayons -- a multi-colored brain that you could draw with.

It would be nice to videotape several steps of the process, partly for the coolness factor of the process and perhaps for marketing -- I imagine there's a few brain specialist that would like a durable brain cast.