Turning smartphone photos into full-color 3D prints: Artec 3D and Mimaki team up to redefine heritage preservation

The quest for an ultrarealistic replica

In the old part of the Serbian capital, you will find a statue that fascinates an onlooker: a bronze fisherman wrestling a snake, roughly 1.5 meters tall, weathered by decades of exposure, covered in moss, mold, and every kind of textural complexity that makes its digitization both an exciting and daunting task. Now, imagine walking through a square in Belgrade, stopping in front of this striking monument, and deciding to create a flawless, pocket-sized copy of it by the next morning – with nothing but your phone and a 3D printer on your desktop.

The idea may sound wild at first, as historically, duplicating sculptures required costly digitization, manual molding, casting, or hours of tedious digital sculpting. Today, two technologies can make this happen in a revolutionary way. On the capture side, Artec Studio’s AI-powered photogrammetry reconstructs an object from a set of smartphone images. On the output side, Mimaki’s 3DUJ series of full-color inkjet 3D printers transforms that digital twin into a physical object, realistic down to every scratch and patch of moss.

3D model of the statue (left), created with Artec Studio AI Photogrammetry, and its ultra-realistic 3D-printed replica (right), produced with the Mimaki 3DUJ-553.

As part of a recent collaboration, a team of 3D experts aimed to prove that a lifelike physical copy could be achieved seamlessly, with a level of realism nothing else in the market comes close to matching.

Capturing the landmark, one photo at a time

The statue offered a bit of a stress test for photogrammetry due to its complex shape and natural wear of time. “We chose this particular statue because it had a very interesting surface and a lot of small details. There were natural changes on it – moss, traces of mold, damage, and different texture variations. It was interesting to see how well all of these details would transfer into the digital model,” explained Grigoriy Galasiuk, Artec 3D’s video director, who led the on-site capture in Serbia.

Despite these challenges, the data acquisition process turned out fast; the actual shoot took just 15 minutes. Recording video and performing photogrammetric capture simultaneously, Galasiuk collected approximately 350 images while walking around the statue twice. While a professional camera was on hand for video documentation, the flexibility of Artec Studio meant the smartphone photos were more than enough. “It can be any camera or phone. Even a quick video will do – you just have to be careful with angles,” said Galasiuk.

Once the photos were captured, it was up to the software to do the rest. “I uploaded the jpeg photos to Artec Studio, where the final processing was done,” Grigoriy said. “In my opinion, the result turned out really well: the body proportions were preserved accurately, the colors look great, and many small details, scratches, and the concrete texture were captured beautifully. All of that transferred very naturally into the final model.”

The resulting 3D model captured the sculpture with a true-to-life level of detail. The next step? Materializing the digital twin.

The Mimaki 3D printing workflow

With a texture-rich 3D model ready, the project was handed over to Mimaki Engineering in Japan, where Michael Sickels, 3D Product Manager, oversaw the printing side.

Cross-section of the print: a hardened white ink core is covered by a ~1 mm CMYKW ink layer, precisely mixed to produce up to 10 million colors, including pure clear. Image courtesy of Mimaki

The model’s quality allowed for a seamless pipeline. “With this awesome 3D model that we received from Artec, the model was already watertight, and the color image textures were immaculate,” confirmed Sickels. “That said, we did not have to do anything to prepare the 3D model for printing.” Elaborating further, he noted how smooth the transition was: “It was completely pain-free and simple. There was no additional elbow work to make sure the model was 3D printable. It was very much plug and play!”

From there, Sickels laid out the model and created the print job – thanks to Mimaki’s inkjet printing with water-dissolvable supports, there was no need for manual support placement. “The layout software automatically places the minimum required amount of supports wherever there are overhangs,” he explained.

The statue took just over 14 hours to print in full color on the Mimaki 3DUJ-553. Inside the printer, a carriage with eight printheads moves left to right over the build area – with each pass instantly cured by UV lamps and flattened by a roller before the next layer begins. The internal architecture of the printed statue highlights how sophisticated the Mimaki process is – the model is built from the inside out, with a pure white hardened core wrapped in a roughly 1mm shell of precisely mixed CMYKW ink capable of producing up to 10 million colors, including pure clear.

The Mimaki 3DUJ-553: the right tool for the job. Image courtesy of Mimaki

Once printing finished, the statue was put into an ultrasonic cleaner filled with water. After about four hours, all of the support material had dissolved away, leaving the finished piece to simply air-dry on the table.

In many ways, the project broke the limits of color realism associated with past technologies. Thinking of the broader challenge of 3D printing cultural heritage objects, Sickels emphasized why color accuracy matters so much: “When you have these very important cultural heritage models, it is critical that the 3D print looks as close to the real thing as possible. Realism is key. This photorealistic color expression is the big benefit that Mimaki technology brings to this cultural heritage application.”

A statue is reborn. What comes next?

The finished print speaks for itself – even the snake is captured with enough detail to almost hear it hissing. For Sickels, this project is a glimpse of something even bigger, far beyond conventional visualizations or museum archives. “Artec Studio Lite makes it easy for anyone with a camera to go out into the world and create high-quality full-color 3D printable data,” he said. “With that in mind, the synergy with Mimaki 3DUJ full-color 3D printing is strong, and we see many potential applications.”

Cultural heritage preservation is a great starting point, but Mimaki envisions the same workflow repeated for a diverse variety of audiences, including consumer markets, 3D printing enthusiasts and hobbyists, or students in design, fashion, and biology programs. A powerful new tool for turning ideas into physical objects makes innovators like Sickels “look forward to all the places we will go with this.”

Ultimately, this workflow provides an unparalleled tool for learning and collaborative design. The weathered statue in Belgrade is just one example of a full-color replica born from a phone camera and a printer. This project is proof that ultra-realistic 3D printing no longer requires a studio full of specialized equipment – just the right tools, working together, in the hands of people who have ideas.