Restoring China's Forbidden City With 3-D Printing

First time accepted submitter jcho5 writes "China's 600-year-old Forbidden City is looking less forbidding these days. As part of a major restoration, the Chinese Palace museum will use 3D-Printers to re-manufacture and replicate many of the city's most precious and unique objects. From the article: 'PhD student Fangjin Zhang—along with her colleagues at Loughborough Design School in the East Midlands of England—had, for a number of years, been looking into the use of 3D printing as means to restore sculptures and archaeological relics. According to a Loughborough press release, Zhang developed a “formalized approach tailored specifically to the restoration of historic artifacts.” After reviewing Zhang’s techniques, the Palace Museum then invited Loughborough researchers to repair several Forbidden City artifacts, including the ceiling and enclosure of a pavilion in the Emperor Chanlong Garden.'"

Scan.. Repair... Print...

[dryriver]

As I understand it, they take ancient objects from the Forbidden City that are damaged (cracked, parts missing), scan them into a computer with a 3D optical or laser scanner, repair/restore the object/artifact in digital 3D space - using organic modeling tools like ZBrush perhaps - then use a 3D printer to print out the repaired/restored 3D object at 1:1 scale to the original object. It says in TFA, towards the bottom, that the Smithsonian Museum is about to engage in a similar effort of 3D scanning thousands of objects from it collection, and printing 1:1 replicas of them with 3D Printers.

Re:burned

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the artifacts of the Forbidden City are in Taiwan, Republic of China (ROC), so they escaped the Cultural Revolution.