3D Models- Mining figurine and towel
Creating Digital Collections
- by Esther Kamara- February 2020
- <5 minute read
- Written as an assignment for the mA course: Creating Digital Collections I
reflection
Creating a 3D collection of mining objects was more challenging that I initially assumed. There were two main obstacles during the process; the photography and preparation of capturing the images and working with the software.
Photography
The preparations during the skills trainings emphasised the importance of quality photographs and ensuring that there was overlap between the pictures of the objects.
In practice however, this was harder than thought. As we had only small objects which we photographed in a lightbox (with exception of the towel), we had not prepared enough in advance. Most of our photographs did not align due to lack of different perspectives, and sometimes the objects were too reflective and monochromatic.
When taking the pictures, my main focus was to check the quality of them in the programme. This gave us a false sense of security; it would have been better if we had been able to apply masks immediately and see whether the photo’s aligned. This would have saved us delay in the entire process of 3D modelling.
Software
As I was new to this entire process, and have little skill with photography, I spent too much time on poorly photographed pictures that did not align. Applying masks was one of the main steps that I did wrong in the beginning. As our objects were photographed in the lightbox, I created masks for everything but the object, resulting in photo’s that did not align. The towel was problematic because there were two sets of pictures with different lighting conditions and camera positions; and here too I learned that proper masking could solve many of the alignment issues. Especially adding a secondary point of recognition in the shot improved alignment.
takeaway
What I learned is that it requires practice and repetition and careful analysis of my own mistakes to improve workflow. The second try created a full-fledged 3D model in 12 hours. Taking into account all the wrongs of the first try, the workflow now allowed for better results, even if I could not use cloud processing for higher quality models as I use a MacBook.
Models
