My latest story is available to read now at dot.LA. It’s about a joint project between California State University Los Angeles and the University of Southern California to digitize their respective archives of Mesoamerican and Spanish Colonial artifacts and photographs.
EXCERPT:
“We’re hoping to do some 3D printing on campus of some of the objects,” said Ramirez. “It’s supposed to be a teaching collection in many ways but, obviously, many of the artifacts are very delicate so we don’t want people accidentally dropping them. We’re hoping to 3D print some of them so that it’s feasible and students can actually handle some of them because we have a Mesoamerican Studies minor on our campus.”
The photography collection also includes nearly 10,000 images printed on 35mm slides. The images are dated from the 1950s to the 1980s and feature Mesoamerican objects held in museums in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, the US, and South America. Of these, Cunningham has digitized 4,500 of them.
Cunningham uses a different camera and process to digitize physical objects such as statues and jars. He uses a Phase One XF camera with a 100-megapixel Phase One IQ3 digital back. Normally, he shoots 32 images of each item from one of three angles for a total of 96 images to create a single 3D render of an object. The 3D render is processed using Agisoft Metashape.
Link: https://dot.la/usc-csula-digitize-mesoamerica-artifacts-2655544787.html
Afroxander (aka Iván Fernández) 