Team members: Lily Adler, Maina Abe, and Sabrina Mansour
Our team looked at the Dark Stone “Stream” which is a winding path composed of stones. The stones were sourced from Lake Superior, adding a link to the element of water which is often associated with Japanese gardens. Because the Japanese Garden is a dry garden, no actual water (besides the Tsukubai washbasin) is present and like many other elements, the Dark Stone “Stream” is representative and not literal.
We found that the manual photogrammetry was less effective and more time consuming than we expected. Obviously, it was more efficient than modeling the Dark Stone “Stream” by hand, but using photogrammetry wasn’t as seamless as we expected. Even though we thought we used good quality photos, the Metashape software was not able to use all of them. That being said, the Metashape model is much cleaner than the Scaniverse model. 3D modeling clearly has its advantages and with the advancements of AI, we expect these processes to increase in efficiency and precision.
Lily
I used Polycam to make a panorama of the environment visible from the base of the Dark Stone “Stream”. The process was very straightforward, but it was difficult to keep my phone completely steady especially with how long it took to capture the entire panorama. I also had issues with error messages and not being sure what was causing them. Attempting to slow down didn’t help, so I assume it was just an issue with the complexity of the environment.
Maina
I worked on taking photos of our feature and ended up taking more than the recommended 30 to 50 (closer to 100). While I didn’t run into issues taking the photos, I did find that because our feature was very long and therefore also relatively large, I had to take many photos. It was difficult to determine how close up I should take the photos, and even with the amount I took, I felt as though the matching during the photogrammetry process wasn’t great.
Sabrina
My contribution to the project is the Scaniverse model. It was both easier and harder than I thought it would be to use, as it was very easy to get a model, but harder to get one that looks good, especially because I couldn’t get all of the angles I needed because of the rocks and plants around the Dark Stone “Stream”. A drawback of Scaniverse, however, is that the cropping tool only works in a rectangular prism, meaning that I can’t remove some of the random debris without cutting off the rest of the model.