A Little Bit of Paralympic Glory for the Creaform Portable 3D Scanners

Photo: Latrèche winning his individual bronze medal in London against Italian fencer Marco Cima, in September 2012. Credit: L’Équipe

Alim Latrèche is a 36 year-old paralympic fencing champion, with quite the resume to boot. Having represented France in the Athens (2004), Beijing (2008) and London (2012) Paralympic Games, the athlete brought back one gold, one silver and two bronze medals to his hometown of Grenoble over the course of his career.

While he is proud of all of his four medals, Mr. Latrèche is especially fond of the first bronze he won in London, since it is his only individual one (the other medals were awarded as part of team competitions).

Image credit: Alim Latrèche

Latrèche additionally “moonlights” as a Project Manager, pursuing a successful career for Schneider Electric (an important Creaform customer). But even while he does not earn a living through his sport, he is still completely dedicated to fencing, and trains for several hours every day.

The athlete first fell in love with the sport before the accident that completely changed his life, in December of 1997 (Latrèche was 18 years old, and prefers not to provide details about the unfortunate event). Upon his rehabilitation, he was told that he could still practice a sport while in a wheelchair, and fencing naturally came to mind. What he enjoys the most about the sport: its competitive aspect, as well as its potential to constantly surpass himself.

3D SCAN

Recently, the fencing club Mr. Latrèche belongs to (Escrime Grenoble Parmentier) contacted Creaform Metrology Services team to perform two scans involving the athlete.

First, a HandySCAN 3D was used to scan his individual bronze medal. The idea was for the scan to be used to later 3D print his medal in several copies. These replicas can be then donated to schools or paralympic clubs Latrèche sometimes visits, to talk about this life path, training and success. The fencer can thus serve as a role model and inspire the next generation of athletes (paralympic or not), as well as make his medal accessible to a larger portion of the population.

The HandySCAN 3D portable 3D scanner captured the high level of details of the medal (see below), which were especially important because, among other things, it includes Braille. The 3D scan was performed with the finest resolution possible, and then reworked in CAD software. As you can see in the second picture below, the part surrounded by green was created in CAD, since this is where the medal was held during the scan!

The medal was scanned in about 15 minutes while the post-processing took all of two hours.

Additionally, the 3D color scanner the Go!SCAN 3D was used to scan Mr. Latrèche wearing his medal. This body scan perfectly highlights the potential of the 3D digitizer to capture human shapes…

Congratulations to Alim Latrèche, a remarkable athlete, for both his Paralympic performance as well as his commitment in the education and motivation of youngsters!