Buddhist statue restored with help of 3D printing

The Qianshou Guanyin or Thousand Hands Goddess is part of the Dazu Rock Carvings which dates back to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). The entire stone-carved statue of Buddhist statue, including the statues of four attendants, is 7.7 meter tall and 12.5 meter wide. It is carved in a 15~30 meter high cliff and is the largest Thousand Hands Goddess statue in the world, covering nearly 88 square meters of floorspace.

The Thousand Hands Goddess is undergoing major restoration work, funded by the Chinese government. Rather than using a traditional method involving molding and casting, researchers used a 3D scanner and other low cost tools to capture the shape of the statue and build a 3D digital file of the statue. In order to create this super large prints, they sliced the 3D model into sections, printed out each component and then glued them together.