We all live our busy lives going day to day doing the things we have to do or love to do. How often do you stop and think about the price paid for the freedom we all have? With tensions rising in foreign countries recently it reminded me of the price paid by our veterans and current military personal in keeping us safe and protecting those freedom.
We recently just finished another scanning project involving some of our those heroes and we also had a chance to visit Orlando’s Veterans Memorial Park and see a Vietnam War Memorial we had worked on. The final bronze casting was put in place at the memorial and it was quite moving to actually see the final product.
EMS worked with American Bronze Foundry in Sandford, FL to 3D scan the original model, make changes to it and scale it up to over 9 feet in size. What was a little different for this project is the original model was not sculpted from clay or foam to begin with. It was a pair of mannequins dressed in military outfits. The group raising the money to have the memorial created needed a replica of the statues to go out and raise money. They decided to build their own replica and take it on the road raising the money need to build the memorial.
Once the money was raised EMS was called in to 3D Scan the statues. One issue besides 
having to scale the model larger that made 3D scanning a requirement, was the statues weren’t exactly the way the donors wanted the final memorial to look like. With the power of digital 3D sculpting software like SensAble Technologies – FreeForm Modeling, EMS was able to manipulate the 3D scan data until the customer was happy. This took several iterations of moving hands, guns, torsos, legs, etc to get the right look and proportions. Once finished the 3D scan data was then scaled up to its final size of 9 feet.
This 3D scan data was then sent to another company that did the CNC machining of the master pattern for the bronze casting process. That master pattern then went to American Bronze for the final casting.
The final product is a beautiful memorial in Orlando the will be a reminder to everyone for many years to come the ultimate sacrifice many men and women have made to keep us free and safe.
You can see a detailed overview of the entire process here