Winners of Creaform design contest announced

Creaform announced the winners of its Put Us to the Test 2010 challenge. Last August, the Lévis, Québec-based 3D scanner company launched the contest, encouraging participants to submit the most challenging engineering projects to its team of experts. The three most challenging entries would receive thousands of dollars in engineering labour hours from Creaform.

Benjamin Julian, owner of Conceptual Art Technologies LLC and General Motors digital modeler, won the $20,000 “Nothing is Impossible” grand prize for his Walking Horse project. His idea is to design a walking mechanical quadruped modeled on the musculoskeletal system of a real horse and able to support a 200-lbs rider. Creaform’s engineers plan to reverse engineer a full-scale horse to collect the morphological data necessary and determine the proper frame structure dimensioning, choice of materials, internal motion structure design and construct and kinematics.

First runner-up Alain Albert of B.C.-based forestry research company, FP Innovations, received the $2,000 “Consider it Done!” prize for his Aboriginal Totem Pole project. The project involves 3D scanning two existing pieces of Aboriginal artwork (a mask and a totem pole). The ultimate goal is to carve the artefacts using a five-axis CNC machine and provide First Nations artists of Canada with a 21st-century tool to improve their output and meet the growing demand for the art.

Submitted by second runner-up Glenn Thayer of Dallas-based material handling company Globe Composite Solutions, The Helmet Project involves 3D scanning a helmet for ongoing production. The scan would be used to build an aluminum mould to replace the soft tooling currently used that requires maintenance and re-working.
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