Ten years ago I scanned a lot of my friends with a Minolta VI910 3D scanner without knowing that I could eventually print them one day.

So I allready had this 3D scan of my friend Cedric when he was 30 years old. But as you can see, it's far from being printable because it's only a partial scan of just his face (it's not a closed and manifold mesh).

To make it printable I had to complete his head, add some hair and shoulders.

I started by decimating the mesh to work with fewer polygons (having so many is not necessary for a sculpture that will only be about 10cm high).
Then I completed the back of his head (skull) and filled the holes (filling holes behind the ears was quiet difficult indeed...).

And I downloaded this cool 3D mesh of Bruce Lee by kkleon02 (Congrats Leon, you're a very good 3D modeler!), cut it to only keep the shoulders and aligned Cedric's head to Bruce's.

Again, I filled the holes making connection between the head and torso.

I smoothed the connection and cut Bruce's torso at the desired height.

I also imported some hair from another mesh and used the same process to connect it to Cedric's head.

The bust was then ready for printing.

I decided to print it completely hollow and without internal supports wich was quiet a challenge in the horizontal areas like the "shoulders-to-neck" part. And I was very surprised that it printed so well on my BfB3000 without any internal stringing. Great ! (only the top of the head didn't print well but that was expected)

Finally I finished the top (hair) with some ABS soup (ABS melt in acetone), filled the sculpture with plaster to make it more pleasing when holding it (heavier) and sanded it a bit.

I'm not 100% satisfied with the result but I think Cedric is very pleased with his 3D sculpture and that was the goal.

Happy birthday my friend !
Bon anniversaire mon poto !
Честито рожден ден моят приятел!

Here are other busts of some of my friends that I also printed in the past.