4Visualization/ Sketchfab
Trix T Rex scan case study
The 3D model of Trix on Sketchfab
3D scanning service provider, 4Visualization has harnessed Artec 3D's scanning solutions and Ultimaker’s 3D printing technology to fill in the gaps of the third most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found.
Trix was uncovered in 2013, some 66 million years after it lived, by Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a Dutch national museum based in Leiden. The mission first began a year earlier, as the museum committed to the development of a new exhibition hall, and targeted an increase of visitors per annum to 400,000 from 300,000. They’d need something big to help draw in the crowd and so set about on a quest to procure a Tyrannosaurus skeleton.
An amateur palaeontologist was first to come across some of the dinosaur’s bones 50km south of Jordan, Montana in May 2013. A local fossil hunter confirmed it to be a Tyrannosaurus skeleton and three months later, after the Black Hills Institute heard of the discovery, Anne Schulp led her team of palaeontologists from Naturalis Biodiversity Center to unearth the skeleton, thought to be between 75-80% complete. They named it Trix after the Netherlands’ former Queen Beatrix, who abdicated the throne earlier that year.
Trix T Rex
The complete skeleton of the T.Rex in 3D
All essential, larger bones were present, and the quality of the fossil is said to be unmatched by any other in the world. To prepare it for exhibiting, the museum contracted Valentin Vanhecke, the founder of 4Visualisation, to scan the overall skeleton and provide the missing bones.
“This was great,” said Valentin. “Everything was done with the [Artec] Eva, only the very last two of the vertebrae – which are only a few cm long – I managed to do them but they were really on the limit of the smallest size possible. On the other end is the skull, which is nearly 2m long and has a lot of detail, pathology and hollow space, like the eye sockets and all of the nasal passages.”
Valentin made two trips to the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota, where Trix’s bones were prepared prior to scanning. The Artec Eva scanner he used was supplied by Artec’s Gold Partner 4C Creative CAD CAM Consultants. Its capabilities were put to the test when a small bone was found that leads from the outer ear toward the inner ear. The bone is a 3-4mm high ridge that is nearly 1mm thick and 5cm long. Despite its tiny magnitude, the Eva managed to capture it effectively, though hardly easily. It took two weeks to scan the smaller bones, while the overall fossil took only a day.
“Then came the post-processing for all of those bones which I did in my office, mostly in the off-time in my company,” explains Valentin. “This left me with a box of about 200 puzzle pieces without the picture on the front of the box.”
Trix T Rex
Putting together the scans of the cranium, vertebrae and ribs in Artec Studio 11.
The Artec Studio 11 software was used for smooth fusion of the bones with the resolution anywhere between 0.3mm and 0.5mm depending on the size or detail. Files also ranged in size, between 200mb and 1,000mb, so Valentin decimated the meshes, and loaded them in one project with the overall scans of the complete skeleton. For the missing bones, Valentin would look toward the two more complete T-rex skeletons to be found, Sue and Stan. Mirroring of the bones the pair could boast of, and Trix was missing, was done in Autodesk Meshmixer. It resulted in Trix being given a slight quirk to separate her from her counterparts.
“When a bone was missing from our T-rex, I used casts of other specimens. The feet, for instance, came from Sue and some of the missing vertebrae from Stan. The right leg was found complete, but the left one was missing so now Trix ‘walks around’ on two right legs,” revealed Valentin.
Trix T-rex
This bone is part of the lower jaw of the T.Rex. The round holes were made by the teeth of anotherdinosaur. The wounds were nowhere near fatal as they healed perfectly.
Though her gait might have been compromised, Trix was well on her way to being the highlight of Naturalis Biodiversity Center’s newest exhibition hall. All that was left was to 3D print the bones, which would be done on Ultimaker machines, and then figure out how to put all of Trix’s pieces into their intended order. It would take a few more scans.
“Putting the puzzle together was a tedious job as the skeleton is about 13 metres long from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail,” confessed Valentin. “At first I hoped to do it with all the bones in the high resolution that I had scanned them but that was too much for my computer, so I had to simplify all the bones to keep the total size workable.”
Trix T-Rex
The cranium of T.Rex in Artec Studio 11
Simplifying the file, the scanned T-rex skeleton was able to be uploaded online and viewed by average computers. It was featured on Dutch national television in the ‘Expedite T.Rex’ film, and can also be viewed on the 4Visualisation page on Sketchfab.
The real thing spent nine months in the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, from September 2016 until June 2017, attracting nearly 300,000 visitors. Since, Trix has been embarking on a tour through a series of museums in Europe and China, while the Naturalis building undergoes renovation. Trix will visit museums in Salzburg, Barcelona, and Paris before heading to China. She is set to return to Leiden in 2019, by which time the Naturalis museum will have a dedicated exhibition hall.
