3D Scanning for Sculpture & Bronze Casting

Capture Your Sculpture. Preserve Every Detail. Create It in Bronze.

Kalispell Art Foundry offers professional 3D scanning services for sculptors, artists, galleries, and collectors. Using high-resolution white light scanning, laser scanning, and photogrammetry, we can digitally capture an existing sculpture and create an accurate 3D model ready for reproduction, resizing, digital sculpting, or bronze casting.

Whether your original is clay, plaster, wood, stone, resin, bronze, or another material, our goal is to capture the character and detail of the artist's original work while creating a digital model suitable for the next stage of production.

From Original Sculpture to Digital Model

3D scanning creates a highly detailed digital representation of your sculpture. The resulting scan can be cleaned and prepared for 3D printing, allowing a physical model to be produced at the original size or at a new scale.

That printed model can then enter the traditional bronze casting process at Kalispell Art Foundry.

Original Sculpture → 3D Scan → Digital Model → Resize or Prepare → 3D Print → Mold & Wax → Lost-Wax Bronze Casting

This process combines modern digital technology with traditional bronze craftsmanship.

Our 3D Scanning Technologies

White Light Scanning

White light scanning is ideal for capturing sculptures with intricate surface detail and complex forms. Projected light patterns are used to accurately record the surface geometry of the sculpture without physically contacting the artwork.

This method is especially useful for detailed figurative work, wildlife sculpture, maquettes, reliefs, and other pieces where subtle surface texture is important.

Laser Scanning

Laser scanning allows us to digitally capture larger sculptures and complex forms with a high degree of accuracy. It can be particularly useful for monuments, large-scale sculpture, architectural elements, and artwork that would be difficult to capture using smaller scanning systems.

Photogrammetry

Photogrammetry uses a series of carefully captured photographs taken from many different angles to reconstruct the sculpture as a three-dimensional digital model.

This technique can be especially useful for large sculptures, installed artwork, monuments, and pieces that cannot easily be transported to the foundry.

Resize Your Sculpture

One of the greatest advantages of creating a digital model is the ability to change the scale of an existing sculpture.

A small maquette can become a life-size or monumental bronze. A large sculpture can be reduced to create a smaller edition. Existing artwork can also be reproduced at its original dimensions.

Because the proportions are derived from the original 3D scan, the artist's composition is maintained as the sculpture is scaled.

3D Printing for Bronze Casting

Once the scan has been prepared, the digital model can be used to produce an accurate 3D-printed physical model.

The printed sculpture can then be prepared for mold making and enter our traditional lost-wax bronze casting process.

Our full-service foundry capabilities allow us to take a project from:

Scanning → Digital Preparation → 3D Printing → Mold Making → Wax → Ceramic Shell → Bronze Pour → Metal Chasing → Patina → Finished Bronze

Having the scanning, digital reproduction, and bronze casting process coordinated through a sculpture foundry helps ensure that the digital model is created with the requirements of bronze production in mind.

Preserve Your Sculpture Digitally

3D scanning is also an excellent way to create a permanent digital record of an original sculpture.

Once an accurate digital model has been created, it can provide artists and their estates with an important archive of the work and may allow future editions, replacements, resizing, or reproductions without requiring the original sculpture to be scanned again.

Ideal for

Our scanning services can be used for original clay sculptures and maquettes, existing bronze sculptures, plaster and resin originals, enlargements for monumental sculpture, reductions for smaller editions, restoration and reproduction projects, archival preservation, and artwork that needs to be converted into a production-ready digital model.

Have a Sculpture You Would Like Scanned?

Send us photographs of your sculpture along with its approximate dimensions and tell us what you would like to accomplish.

We can help determine whether white light scanning, laser scanning, or photogrammetry is the best approach for your project and discuss the next steps for digital preparation, 3D printing, and bronze casting.

Contact Kalispell Art Foundry to discuss your 3D scanning project.

From the artist's original sculpture to the finished bronze, we combine digital technology with traditional foundry craftsmanship.