Getting to work on this museum project is exciting as we are getting to take an inherently physical object that people come to see in person and make it into something that people can appreciate and understand in a digital format. I have looked at online museum catalogs before, but never took the time to think about what goes into creating the digital artifacts. In these situations it is also often just photos of the pieces, but in our case we actually get the opportunity to 3D model and digitally image the objects so that they can be experienced and understood on a deeper level.
To start off the project our group met up at the Weitz and went into the Perlman Teaching Museum Classroom, where I’ve never been before. It was exciting to get to get up close to our artifact (a pig figurine) that we had previously only seen through a protective glass case. The lighting was great for photographs and we circled around the pig many times and a number of different angles so that we could upload the pictures to ReCap Photo and start creating our 3D model. One hiccup that we ran int was getting our photos out of an HIEC format (as we took the pictures on an iPhone) so that they were JPGs and could be processed by ReCap, but we got there eventually.
I feel like I have become much more familiar with our Pig throughout this process in a way that I did not get from viewing it at the Perlman. The 3D imaging process allows you to see many different angles and discrepancies in the object that is just not possible through a glass layer. I am excited to see how the final product turns out and how other group’s objects look as well.
