American Committee Model (Statue of Liberty)

thingiverse

The first souvenir models of the Statue of Liberty to be made and sold here in the United Statues were referred to as the "American Committee Models." They were made in Brooklyn, NY under an agreement with the American Committee, which had been created years earlier to raise funds to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. It was hoped that the sale of these souvenir models would help raise funds and also pay a royalty after completion to the artist Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the creator of Liberty. While the models alone weren't enough to raise funds to finish the pedestal, they were popular and sold widely across the United States. They are a popular item for collectors today. I had always wanted one but balked at the steep prices some of these models command in auctions like eBay. I luckily found one and had an opportunity to take photos to recreate it. You can read more about the circumstances and history of the American Committee Models here: http://goo.gl/1wbwcG How I Designed This I snapped about 60 photos of this model inside a light tent. The model stood on a lazy susan so I could more quickly turn it and not handle it too much. I took all the photos as DNGs so I could capture the maximum detail possible. I then processed the files in Photoshop Elements to tune the files, then exported them into Lightroom. There I double-checked my work and exported them as TIFFs. The resulting folder of TIFF files was then used by Photoscan to create this model. I used the 'High' setting at each step. When the model was finished, I exported it as an OBJ file and opened it in Meshmixer. There I scaled it to match the original in size. I then tried to smooth out some of the noisier spots without losing the shape and details. I finally exported it as another OBJ file and opened it in Memento to decimate it. I did this to shrink the file size down a bit more and finally exported it as an STL file to share here. While it is an OK model, I'm still not doing something quite right as the important fine details like Liberty's fingers, toes and other things tend to not be modeled very well. I consider it more of a user problem than the software. I'll likely return to this project sometime in the future to try modeling it at a better resolution again.