3D scanning of the Wimbledon plate

We scanned the Wimbledon plate won by tennis player Petra Kvitova in 2011. It is currently in Fulnek in the hall of fame of our successful tennis player. The plate was converted into a 3D model and in the future, it is planned to create a replica on a 3D printer. The digitalisation of exhibits is a way to bring visitors to museums and galleries into the closest possible contact with the exhibited elements. One plan is even to offer the experience to blind visitors. The 3D replica will serve as a haptic aid in the Hall of Fame.

The trophy has a very detailed and subtle pattern on it that needed to be captured. Therefore, a 3D scanner of the highest quality had to be used to digitise it. We, therefore, chose the ATOS Q 12 M 3D scanner from GOM/ZEISS, which enables high-resolution scanning of up to 33 dots per millimetre. This high resolution obviously reduces the volume that can be scanned in one shot. We were able to cope with this situation and managed to scan an exceptional trophy successfully.

Since the plate is shiny, it was necessary to blur it at the beginning. For this, the special spray ATTBLIME AB6 - G, which was applied to the plate with an airbrush gun, served perfectly. Its advantage is that after a few hours it sublimated from the surface without residue and we did not have to clean the plate after scanning.

To digitalize the entire trophy, multiple images had to be created. The scanner software itself identified the common shape areas and automatically joined them using the so-called "best-fit" method. The scanning of the bottom of the plate went best, with the first 20 images stacking on top of each other without any problem. In the second series of shots, as the scan window moved further away from the centre of the plate and the overlap area with the previous shots became smaller, the software had to be manually assisted with the initial positioning of the shot. Where the complex relief of the plate allowed it, small reference points were glued in to facilitate the automatic stacking of shots.

Due to the small size of the plate (100x80 mm), the upper part of the plate was scanned in several series of shots. A sort of "ring" of scanned areas was created and these were then joined together via common reference points. After the experience with the top side, reference marks were applied directly to the rounded smooth surfaces at the bottom of the plate and to places where the point sticker did not cover the fine relief.

To join the two sides of the plate into a single unit, four reference points were used, glued to the peripheral edge of the plate. The joining was successful with an accuracy of 0.016 mm.

The entire scan took 4.5 hours and 357 scanner positions generated a final project size of 26 gigabytes. After processing the data through a polygonization process, the result is a polygonal network with 80 million points and an STL file size of 7.6 gigabytes.