Moses by Michelangelo

thingiverse

The first almost completely textured model of Moses I’ve successfully created. Others were missing textures from the top or rear. I am surprised at how well this model turned out since all the photos (about 340+) were shot with the standard Apple Camera app on my iPhone 6 Plus. It helped that I had a deeply overcast sky to even out the exposures. I also had a lot of help using a 12-foot painters pole and my Apple Watch to remotely fire the camera. I looked silly to the passing students and staff, but the result is satisfying. I've included a handful of photos of the original bronze that I modeled from. I have a total of 348 JPG photos covering nearly the entire sculpture available upon request for free. How I Designed This I used a 12-foot painters pole with an old Pentax film camera attached to it. I taped my iPhone 6 Plus to the rear of the Pentax with blue painters tape. With my Apple Watch I was able to remotely trigger the Camera app as I raised and lowered the pole, carefully walking around the sculpture multiple times. I probably took shots from nearly the same angles several times and certain parts like the head, the beard, the feet, etc, were photographed more heavily than other parts due to the complexity or detail. As you look at the photographs of the bronze model, you can understand why it is not easy to get complete shots of Moses from the far rear, especially where his upper back and shoulder blades almost touch the aggregate concrete slab standing behind him and his pedestal. After running out of battery on the Apple Watch, I wrapped up my session with some more handheld shots of the overall figure. At home, I removed any blurry shots resulting from the pole moving. As these were out of the camera JPG photos, there was really no processing them as the JPG is a very lossy format. As a last step, I stripped out the location data in the EXIF as that tends to confuse Photoscan when the photos are taken so closely together. I then started out using 348 photos in Agisoft Photoscan. I initially started with the 'low' quality settings from matching through point cloud, dense point cloud, meshing and finally texture. Once I was satisfied that the photos would work, I started over at the 'medium' setting. Upon completion of the mesh stage, I then used the model as a mask on the photographs. Once Photoscan was finished masking all the photos, I then started over once again but in the 'high' quality setting. The model took all night and into the late morning to finish rendering but the result was deeply satisfying. With the exception of a butterfly shaped region on the upper shoulder blades of Moses and the rear of the backwards-projecting right arm holding the tablet, the entire sculpture was rendered and textured with little need for further intervention. Since I didn't want to share a model with holes in it as I had in earlier version, I exported the mesh into Meshmixer to fill the holes and smooth out the odd artifacts here and there on the model. I then imported it back into Photoscan and recreated the texture map once again. At that point, the model was as closely finished as I could make it with my low skill set in modeling. I plane-cut the bottom of the model to make it level for printing in the STL file. I exported Moses in a variety of formats hoping that the texture map would be copied intact. So far the only file that I can see that achieved this was the DAE file. For some reason the PLY and the OBJ files didn't preserve the texture map. If anyone would like to access all my Moses photos to try modeling him themselves, please get in contact with me. I'd be happy to share them for free. I'm curious to see what the results would look like when other people work with my photos, especially in other software. Since I'm on a Mac and not very tech-savvy, using open source software like SFM hasn't worked for me, nor do the many more choices that only run in Windows at this time. If wanted, I can share my photos as an archive in Dropbox.