Mount Rushmore from Internet Images & Free Software

thingiverse

About 15 years ago, a company called MetaCreations Corp released a product called Canoma. In the current context its functionality was pretty limited, but at the time it blew me away. It allowed you to input a photograph and then with a fairly straightforward interface, allowed you to bend and rotate the image in 3d. When I saw the See the World contest, I knew I wanted to respond to the challenge by using existing software to try and create a 3d object of a well known sculpture, building or landmark. After a few false starts (most notably the Statue of Liberty), I lucked onto Mount Rushmore. For such a famous landmark, I’m surprised there’s no 3d models of it to speak of. While researching the current availability of software, I came across VisualSFM, which seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, as it claimed it could create a point cloud from non-sequential images. Most programs that this very important first step in 3d modeling — creating a point cloud -- want or expect the images to have been taken pretty much at the same time, and often with the same camera. So I spent a few leisurely hours downloading images of Mount Rushmore (well more than just a few, and not that leisurely), and then spent more time than I care to admit learning all about how to prepare my image set for processing by VisualSFM and the other programs in the tool chain. I haven’t personally been to Mount Rushmore, but I’ve spent so much time pouring over pictures that I think I could reasonably expect to get a job as a guide. I think I know every nook and cranny the monument has. Now that the world has an STL file of Mount Rushmore, I’m sure it’ll be no time at all before all sorts of monuments start popping up with one or more the the presidents’ faces replaced by someone else’s image… say Stephen Colbert for example? While googling about the net for everything and anything Mount Rushmore I came across the following quote from a Makerbot blog in 2011 (http://www.makerbot.com/blog/tag/meshlab): “Using My3DScanner Tony uploaded 30 pictures from his camera phone to create the above gnome clone.  Awesome!nWho is going to be the first person to create a 3D image of Mount Rushmore using this system?” Well I didn’t use the service talked about in the blog, but I think I can claim to be the first person to create a 3D image of Mount Rushmore using only images from the net. In addition to the STL file mountRushmore.stl, I’ve also included the following files: 1. mountRushmoreDense.nvm This is the sparse reconstruction file created by VisualSFM that you load into MeshLAB as a project. 2. mountRushmoreDense.0.ply This is the dense reconstruction file that you would import into meshLAB. Loading files 1 and 2 into meshLAB will give you the opportunity to play around with the point cloud and create your own meshes without the time and frustration of VisualSFM. 3. mountRushmore4Blender.ply This is the mesh I created with MeshLAB and cleaned up to the best of my ability for importing into Blender for final processing. 4. mountRushmore.blend This is a Blender file, with the simple objects I assembled and placed appropriately before the final construction, i.e. mesh union, intersection and difference. I would have like to included the complete image set, but at over two and half gigabytes, I’m sure that wouldn’t make me very popular at Thingiverse. It was my original intention to provide a video and accurate step by step instructions on how to achieve the same results as I present in the STL file I’ve attached, but unfortunately I have to go out of town and won’t be back until after the See the World challenge closing date. So it will have to wait. Stay tuned, I’ll get back to it when I return.