We mentioned a few blog posts ago that we will be using our new skills and photogrammetry know-how to get a local youth group involved in the collection – and here is a glimpse of how it’s been going!
Greatwood Youth Group have been coming to the Museum after school to learn how to use photogrammetry to create 3D digital models of objects in the collection, with a focus on objects found in local Caves, and during this May half term, they joined us for a whole day session to really get their teeth into the process!
First of all we went over how to take photographs – it might seem like a bit of a silly and very easy step, but the quality of the photos can really affect how the final model turns out, so it was extremely important to get this part right.
The pictures have to show enough light to show the object, and ensure that there aren’t any extreme shadows as this might confuse the software. This is why we use a pop-up light tent and two lights to try and make sure that the light was diffused nicely. We also played around with the different settings on the camera to adjust how much light and ‘noise’ the camera picked up – it was interesting playing around with the settings, and understanding how they can affect the final photo.
Once we finished taking photos of the objects (ensuring that we had got all sides of the object photographed and overlapped the photos nicely), we then moved on to using the software and going through the process of masking the photos and creating the 3D models!
There were some fantastic models created, including a Mesolithic Bone and Antler Chisel, a Brown Bear Claw, and a Bronze Age Axehead- have a look below!
It’s been really great to have the Greatwood Youth Group here creating the models – not only was it brilliant fun teaching them some new skills, but the models they have created have helped us as a Museum to interpret the objects in a new and innovative way, so we can tell the story of the Craven area, and get the objects out and engaging more people.
We hope we will be able to continue to create new models with the Youth Group, and we will be using these on our website (and on this blog, of course!) to help tell the story of Craven, and as part of our displays for the newly redeveloped Museum!