Before we started 3D scanning items from Carleton’s archive, we reached out to David Bliss, Carleton’s Digital Archivist & Librarian. Mr. Bliss was able to send us a digital database containing all of the items in the archive. As a group, we chose six items of clothing from the archive, and Mr. Bliss brought the items to the library’s archive room. To get started with our 3D scans, we checked out a dress form and head bust from Carleton’s costume department and maker space respectively.
We assembled a physical and automatic turntable, a tripod, and lighting system to assist us in our modeling process. The small items that we chose to model (hats and a bag), were placed in a “light tent,” with a small turntable that was connected to the Foldio360 app. The app worked alongside the light tent and its connected automatic turntable, and all we had to do was manually set up a tripod system and start the camera. The turntable would spin and the camera would take 24 pictures of every 360º angle of the object. We then moved the tripod above and below the object to have even more detailed pictures of our object, providing additional angles. Overall, we had 72 pictures of each of the small objects.
We then moved to scanning our larger objects, which included jackets and sweatshirts. The dress form we had checked out was too large to fit in the light tent, so we had to rely on a different set up. We put the dress form on a large turntable, but with this turntable we could not rely on an app to rotate the objects and take automatic photos. We set up the tripod, and manually took photos of the dress form in different positions. We took turns manually spinning the dress form step-by-step and took corresponding photos of each angle. We then shifted the tripod on top of and below the objects to achieve various angles and perspectives. We had around 72 pictures of each of the large objects.
After we took all of the photos, we uploaded all 72 pictures of each individual object to Metashape Pro, which uses photogrammetry to create 3D models of objects. Photogrammetry is the process of using measurements from photos to create 3D digital recreations. We uploaded all 72 pictures of each individual object to Metashape, which uses the overlapping images and camera orientation to generate 3D coordinates of each object. We attempted to use a similar 3D modelling tool, Polycam, but it didn’t work as effectively. All of the 3D models presented on this website were created on Metashape.
You can see all of our 3D models HERE