MakerGear Forum

Wow ! very cool ! it always amazes me how diverse a group this is !!!

What I would like is to be able to use a photo of the bottom of the hoof with a ruler in the photo for size so i can tell the computer how big the hoof is then have a library of shoes to drag and drop in the use control points to shape the shoe to the foot.

Could you use a digital "bed of nails" device to scan the hoof? What resolution do you need to capture in XY & Z to be accurate?

jeremy, i do that all the time when designing graphics and designs for vehicles. i have a magnetic ruler that i can toss on the car or truck, take a photo then toss the photo in CorelDraw and layout my design. im sure thats a little more difficult with a somewhat wild animal. i think the trick here to make it easy and repetitive as possible is to come up with some type of spring loaded clamp on ruler. it doesnt need to show exact dimensions really. you only need 2 marks on it with a known dimension. say 5". when in the software the photo can be scaled so the marks are set to 5" apart. this device would also need to be set where there was some type of guide to keep you camera exactly square with the hoof. if the camera angle is off then the photo wont be straight on and the hoof will have a bit of skew to it and not be the right shape. im envisioning something like when you goto the dentist and have an x-ray done.

I do photos and X-rays combined and scale the photos In special software already so have a good system to get the angle right and use something of a known size so getting the photos is no problem what I need to figure out is how to get from the photo to a 2d drawing I can use in my cad program

So, I've only done the lightest personal experimentation with photogrammetry, and it wasn't all that successful, but here's me stringing together some stuff I've worked with into a plausible scenario:

1. Take your photo and turn it high contrast grayscale to make it easier to work with.
2. Import it into Inkscape or other vector tool, and use the autotrace tool to get the appropriate outline vectors. Clean up as necessary. Scale as necessary.
3. Export result as DXF into your favorite CAD tool to use as a sketch.

You could skip 2 and just go with working off the photo directly.

What is inkscape?

Here are the shoes installed

Inkscape is a free vector drawing application with a lot of tools. Like Adobe Illustrator. You can use it to get a clean outline from an image, if you need the shoes to precisely follow the hoof. Or if you just need to size a standard pattern, more or less, you can fit your model around the bitmap image.

jsc wrote:fit your model around the bitmap image

Those shoes would be just about perfect for OpenSCAD: they look like brackets, not flow-y organic shapes.

Feed in the hoof length & width, the frog length & base width, the shoe width & thickness, pick a tread pattern, and out pops a fitted shoe model. You'd want options for overall roundness & surface details, but I admit to not knowing all that much about shoe design; the devil is always in the details I don't know.

But that should work at least as well as starting with a standard size & shape steel shoe, then forging / grinding to fit the hoof...

Agreed, a good OpenSCAD script could do this.