Our (my team included Alex, Jeremy, and Shalim) item was a corncob pipe. There was not much information available about the pipe.
The modeling process was both difficult in some ways and not difficult in other ways. The technology (Scaniverse and Polycam) being available on the phone makes it easy in one way; all that one needs to do to get a model is either take many photos or scan the object. The tricky part is that it produces an imperfect model. Much clean-up is required. Aside from making a model of the pipe, we also made a model of the stuffed horse. Both models when they came out had strange things going out about the bottom of the object, the underside, and where the object rested on the table. For the pipe, this was most obvious in how the long part of it would either have chunks missing or would fuse it to the surface. This was the difficult part. We also had a chance to use the white box and turn table to take pictures of the pipe. This allowed for a consistent background and camera angle, though it did not eliminate the problems of the model having trouble separating the bottom of the object from the surface it was resting on.
Attempting to model an object is definitely more active than viewing one in an exhibit, especially since they are often behind cases, limiting the view of the object. Making the model actually made the object feel less serious due to the errors in the model. Whereas seeing an object behind glass works as a visual cue to the importance of the object, the errors of the model broke this feeling for me. I anticipate a cleaned-up model would remedy this problem, though in the meantime, I do not like this change in reaction on the viewer as it feels it would work against the goals of an exhibit. Through looking at the errors, however, I did end up seeing more specific details of the object. One specific moment that stood out to me is when taking pictures of the pipe in the box, it was flipped on the side to get pictures of the underside. It had a design on the bottom of the cob.
Item #162: “Corncob pipe” · Digital Objects of Carleton · Omeka Admin: Blog 51 thought on “Blog 5”
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Hi Jiao Jiao, I like how you included your experiences with the light box and the issue that persisted. I haven’t thought about it before but I agree with your point that errors in a model could lead to unprofessionalism or bring down the object’s authentic characteristics. I also like the benefit of being able to see every part of the object in a 3D model.