It was snowing when we arrived in Venice in March. Very soon clouds vanished and sun began to shine. But I went to Venice to create clouds! Let me share with you both good and bad scanning experience in Venice. It’s a city of inspiration. I have learned quite a few things about making 3D with my photo camera there.
Venice is not an easy place to take 3D scans: most of the time you are trapped between the buildings and limited in moving around as there is almost no land. For example, this is nice typical Venetian building, but I was able to see and scan it only from one front side.
Moving around in gondola could be a solution, but it is way too expensive and I am not a big lover of listening to “O Sole Mio” for two hours.
So I moved to San Marco square to have more space to maneuver and immediately started to take photos of Dodges Palace, Dome and Basilica. It took only 10-15 photos to scan impressive buildings. Here are snapshots of my 3D point clouds.
And I started to realize that there is no way I can have a complete model of a large building.
Some of the scans look impressive, but if you turn them, there will be big holes almost everywhere. Our service is based on sight of view technology (“you get what you see”), so it is very often impossible to have a complete view of a model. Actually this is inherent in all scanning methods except of 3D tomography.
And here I understood one thing about 3D scanning of a large object: if you want to scan the whole building, do not start unless you have access to all views around the object
I looked around and saw interesting but much smaller objects in the same great square (I will describe my experience with them in my next posts).
Eventually I was unsuccessful scanning large buildings in Venice. Some mental notes I made for myself to improve my scanning techniques:
- If you want a 3D model of a large structure, make sure you have access to all zones to take photos around it and even from the top
- Before you start creating a huge building 3D scan, make sure you know what this model is for. Don’t be too ambitious. Be practical.
- Ensure you have technical resources to manipulate, mesh or at least see huge 3D dataset
But My3DScanner artists are much smarter than me. Just look at what David McMullen has created recently:
