I’m not asking about the worst job. I’m asking about the grimmest one. For me it was when in my teenage years I was making candles you would put on a grave. Most of the time is was just filling the form, burn the right shape and passing it forward. But sometimes I had to fill in for a person who was selling these things, and that is where it gets grim. It was decades ago but I still remember one lady who asked what would be the best candle to memorialize her late husband. And she gave me the whole life story of her and her husband. I shit you not, it was the most touching love story I have ever heard. I quit the next day.
We did occasionally scan children and toddlers as part of a 3D family photo product we offered. Infants usually were a bit too squirmy. In the little statue we’d make it would look like the mother was holding a swaddled bee larva. One of our machines (it was a structured light scanner) had like 50 cameras and did the image capture in one shot. It was actually powered by Raspberry Pi 2s.
We also worked with the cosplay scene in that using our handheld structured light scanner we could get pretty good face and body scans. Instead of doing live castings of hands, faces etc. we could 3D scan the subject and then either print that body part on a 3D printer on which makeup prosthetics etc. could be sculpted, or it could be used to model costume parts in-software.
We had floated the idea of doing death masks. Occasionally for various reasons they cast molds of the deceased, and again we could do this faster and with less mess. And precisely one person also had this idea.