3D Model of Buddha

This is a photogrammetry project that involves the creation of a 3D model of the Buddha sculpture using photographs of the object taken by Daniel Pett from the British Museum. The model, generated using Autodesk Recap Photo, was embedded into this webpage through a shortcode. The aim of the project is to increase accessibility for people who are not able to visit the British Museum in person. It also intends to help people make meaningful inferences about the significance of the object’s features, from a close-up examination.

The data set from which these photographs were taken is called buddhaPreaching_BritishMuseumDH. The 45 images of Buddha from the dataset were uploaded into Autodesk Recap Photo to generate a 3D model. After the model was generated, it was cleaned using the Selection, Delete selection, and Slice features to remove some of the object’s surroundings that were also modeled by the program.

The presentation choices made for the project involved an edit of this webpage’s header and also an embedding of the 3D model into the webpage. In order to reflect the theme of this WordPress post, one of the 45 images was used as the background of the page’s header. Several tools were used to embed the model into the page. The 3D Viewer plugin was installed in WordPress. It uses shortcodes to embed 3D models into a webpage. Since the plugin accepts glb and glTF formats, the model had to be converted from its initial rcm format to glb. First, it was converted to the obj format using Autodesk Recap Photo and then converted to glb using Blender. After, it was uploaded to 3D Viewer and embedded into this post via its shortcode.

Throughout the process, I noticed that it was important to pay attention to details when cleaning the 3D model. Although Recap Photo did a pretty good job of generating a model from the photos, some parts of the object’s surroundings were also generated in the model and needed to be removed. The cleaning involved precision in order not to mistakenly erase the object’s model.