Lion fountain head

thingiverse

In 1907 the Humane Society erected a fountain for the benefit of horses and animals to use at the corner of 8th & N Phillips Ave in downtown Sioux Falls. The fountain takes the form of a circular pool with a large bowl at its center and surmounted by a tall square block. On each face of the block is a bronze lion head with a fountain tap that pours water from the mouth. The fountain has become one of the cherished local landmarks and is a popular backdrop for photos. How I Designed This I used an LG G4 phone with the native camera app. I prefer to use the raw / DNG file format as it gives me the maximum latitude to adjust the photographs at home for maximum use. I took a total of 14 photographs from various angles capturing as much as possible of the lion. There were a few small spots I still missed, but I wasn't aware of it until after I had finished the model. When I took the photographs, it was late in the day and the lion face I chose to photograph was shaded so it wouldn't have any harsh shadows or highlights. Once I came home, I imported the raw / DNG files into Adobe Lightroom and set to work using a homemade camera profile to correct distortions and vignetting. I then carefully evened out the exposures and tones so the photographs would be uniform. I then finally checked each photograph for clarity and sharp details before exporting them as 8-bit TIF files. I imported the file containing all the photos into Agisoft Photoscan and used the 'High' setting as each step. After creating the sparse cloud, I adjusted the bounding box to fit only as much of the lion face as I could, dumping out the surrounding stonework. When Photoscan had completed the mesh, I found it was still a bit noisy and had a few small holes at the top of the mane. I exported the model as a OBJ file and opened it in Meshmixer. I carefully smoothed out the worst of the choppy surface along the edges of the lion face then filled the holes. I still wasn't quite satisfied with the model so I opened it in Remake to finesse it a little more. As a final step, I decimated the mesh down to roughly 125K to keep the details but shrink the model size. I then imported the cleaned OBJ back into Photoscan and finished the model by adding the texture layer.