Election Day 2012: 3D Scanning for Political Animations

As this long election season draws to a close, we're reminded of a very cool project we worked on during the 2008 election cycle.

Direct Dimensions worked with famed cartoonist KAL (of The Economist) and Digital Steamworks to help create animated versions of KAL's renowned political cartoons.

DDI technicians laser scanned KAL’s hand-sculpted clay busts of Clinton, Obama and George W. Bush with a FaroArm-based laser line scanner to capture every element of the clay likeness. From there, PolyWorks software was used to digitally model the data into high-resolution polygonal mesh models. Those models were then given to an animation team and used to create the political video satires.