Section of a frieze, 1916

thingiverse

During my last visit to the MIA (Minneapolis Institute of Art) I stumbled across this charming polychrome terra-cotta architectural frieze fragment. It was created by George Grant Elmslie, the chief draftsman for architect Louis Sullivan. It was part of the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Hector, MN. This fragment was saved during a remodel of the bank in 1970. It is now on display in Room G300, near various other Frank Lloyd Wright items. If you'd like to learn more, check out the page for it at: http://collections.artsmia.org/art/1965/section-of-a-frieze-george-grant-elmslie How I Designed This I was nearing the end of the day and was sore and tired from photographing almost non-stop from opening time that morning. I had already used up one battery and had nearly exhausted the other. I saw the frieze and decided to photograph it on a lark to see if I could model it with fewer than normal photos. I usually photograph things with a huge amount of overlap from every direction I can physically reach. In this instance, even though I was using a tripod, I was a bit careless about the focus from being tired, so the photos weren't razor-sharp as I would have liked. I also was limited by the reach of my tripod and without an AF lens, I couldn't take photos handheld with the limited museum display lighting. So, the very top of the various elements that make up the frieze weren't photographed properly. One model, with the texture, lacks the sides, bottom, top or rear to make it printable. The other model has a rough body made via Meshmixer for printing purposes. I shot everything in RAW in manual mode. When I got home, I imported all the photos into Lightroom and tried to correct the photos for exposure, color and sharpness. Once I was satisfied, I exported the photos as 8-bit TIFs. In Photoscan I used the Medium settings for all the steps to arrive at this model. I did some mesh decimation and extrusion in Meshmixer to arrive at the final STL. The OBJ model is less heavily edited. I hope you enjoy this model. If you can, you should check out the original at the MIA.