Midterm

Introduction: 3D modeling has emerged as a very popular and effective way to digitally archive sculptures and antiques. This project takes image data provided by the British Museum to create 3D models of two different sculptures. The image on the left is an Amaravati Panel dating back to the 1st Century BC. The image on the right is a statue of Gudea, a ruler of the city-state of Lagash, dating back to 2130 BC. Both 3D models are viewable at the bottom of this page.

Sources: The British Museum provides images of both artifacts designed for photogrammetry. These collections are a mixture of images showing the front, back, and top of the sculpture. The images are taken from a couple of meters away, with supplementary close-up images (within centimeters) showing engraving details. The combination of these two types of images is designed to hone in on the general shape of the object with the more distant images, and then fill in sections with higher resolution detail with the closer images. The museum also provides masking information, allowing the modeler to filter out the background in the pictures. This not only speeds up the computation but also creates cleaner models as the computer does not try to incorporate any of the background into the sculpture model.

After downloading the images and mask information from the museum, the data was loaded into Metashape Pro. The majority of files and masks are already formatted. There is some limited data cleaning, consisting of removing some irrelevant images and ensuring that all images have a mask. After this, the data is pretty “plug and play”.

Processes: After all the data is uploaded and cleaned we can generate our 3D model. Metashape Pro is relatively straightforward to use with a good dataset. I chose to use the full quality of the images to get the most out of my data. To create the model, we first align the images, then build the model, and finally construct the texture. Once the model is created, we get a sense of the attention to detail of the artists. We are able to take a close look at the geometry of the sculptures and zoom into the details of any part of the sculpture.

Presentation: Unfortunately, the data for the Amaravati Panel was of such high quality that I cannot show the full resolution model on this website. Below, I display a 1/12 quality model of the panel and a 1/1 resolution model of Gudea. I use Sketchfab to embed the models into this website. I specifically made a decision to have the default viewing angle of the Amaravati Panel be sideways, as this way more people would notice that the panel is engraved on both sides (this is also how it is displayed in the museum). I also chose to include pictures of the panel and statue at the top of this website to show the contrast between viewing an image and a 3D model.

Significance: The largest benefit to generating 3D models is the realism that it adds to objects. Audience members get a better feel for the scale and craftsmanship of an object when they are able to interact with it in a 3D state rather than viewing it as a picture. The shortcoming of these 3D models is that they are of limited quality (due to being on a website) and not in a VR environment. I still believe that they aid the understanding of the audience, but I simply want to note that there are improvements possible.