21 Dec Asian Art Museum: My Photogrammetry Models
I have been hard at work polishing my skills with 3D capture and re-construction. This has been a part of my regular creative process for several years now, but beyond showing off my resulting 3D prints every year at Maker Faire, I haven’t done anything to publish or publicize my models. I decided it’s time to change that. These are too much fun to keep to myself and I think, too beautiful as well.
I’m grateful to the original artists’ skill and inspiration and hope I can do them justice by offering my best possible effort at capturing them accurately and portraying them respectfully. I’m glad that museums allow the public to photograph the work and hope to maintain that privilege. These models will vary somewhat in quality as I always just do the best with the time and conditions that I have. Likewise, my photography, equipment, software, skills and technique are improving over time and my newer models reflect that.
Technically speaking, these models are fairly high resolution. Recently, I have computed models up to about 70 million polygons. Sharing them online requires decimating them to a fraction of that size. Some of these models were created with lower resolution photos from an older Canon 40D, others were created with much higher quality images from my Sony A7ii. Some have been decimated (the polygon mesh has been reduced to a lower quality for the sake of bandwidth), others have been shared in their full resolution. My aim is always to create archival quality models–a bar I don’t often achieve during my casual museum visits. In any case, towards that end, I will be sharing the highest resolution files possible–typically in the range of 3 million polygons each. If you aren’t used to thinking in 3D, this is roughly equivalent to counting the pixels in a 2D image. Roughly.
I’ll publish more here about technique as time goes on, but for now am focused on simply getting the captures online.
I hope you enjoy these models from my visits to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. This is the first time for me to share them publicly. I’m in the midst of preparing many more from the past few years, so stay tuned, and don’t forget your VR goggles.
