Historical Reconstruction

As a thesis project for the Honors College at Purdue I have been reconstructing the Temple to Athena Pronaia in Delphi Greece in 3D. I visited this temple while on a study abroad in Italy and Greece and have been using intensive research to rebuild variations of what experts think it might have looked like. This is part of an on going project that is researching using virtual spaces to teach viewers about historical reconstruction.

Link to an 11 minute proof of concept presentation about my process can be found here.

Photogrammetry

Photogrammetry is the creation of 3D models using a series of images taken of an object in real life. Learning about proper lighting and camera techniques to create clean scans has been an exciting and challenging process

Crowd Sourced Photogrammetry

This is the Artemision Bronze statue from the NAM museum in Athens, Greece. It is made of bronze a was photographed by a group of students while in Greece for a study abroad trip. I then took these crowd sourced photos and imported them into Reality Capture.

From this project I have learned how important good photography processes are in photogrammetry. The artifacts around is neck, thighs, and right hand are because of inconsistent photographing. Many of the photographs I was given access too were over exposed, or blurry which was challenging to create a clean model from.

St. Mere Eglise Props

I was assigned to this project while working at the Envision Center. Both of these models are based on real buildings in the town of St. Mere Eglise, France and are included in a VR game that follows troop patterns from an aerial view on D-Day. My task was to make these hero props that would be used as landmarks and then help lay them out in the correct locations in Unity. I spent a good bit of time researching to ensure I was as true too life as I could get. It was challenging to find reference photos of both the town and the buildings themselves from WWII. Most of what I did find was blurry and in black and white and I felt like Indiana Jones trying to piece together how everything should have looked.

From a technical standpoint, I researched proper baking techniques in both Maya and Substance Painter. While the application isn't perfect It works well when seen from an ariel view. Most importantly, I learned a lot in fixing the issues with the bakes and in hard surface modeling techniques.

Graveyard Environment

I built the indoor and outdoor portions of this scene using premade assets uploaded into Maya. My focus was on experimenting with lighting and composition and how those effected mood. I had a lot of fun with this project and learned a lot about the different lighting techniques and tools Maya has to offer.

I think if I went back, I would clean up the textures that I put on the assets and I would have modeled everything myself as well.