Another term, another studio. I wasn’t originally planning on attending college this term; with the ongoing pandemic and uncertainty I’ve felt with my academic trajectory I felt overwhelmed. I still do. But I realized that even though doing my classes online isn’t perfect, it’s likely all I have to work with for the foreseeable future. So instead of working for a few months to wait while it all blows over, which it clearly won’t, I am going to make the best of it. 

I am going to balancing two separate, fulltime studios this term. An architecture course on integrative design, which I may write on later, and a landscape studio on digital land works, specifically memorials. This course is the one I will be writing about the most, and I will be discussing the first project on Figurative Landscapes here. 

To begin to understand what it means to design a memorial space, we were tasked with creating a memorial site dedicated to a famous composer, which we would base on a small bus. With this bust, we were to create a 3D scan of the object for examination and then later abstraction into a landscape. 

I was a bit late joining in with the rest of the studio, and so had to wait a bit longer than the rest of the class to receive my bust of Mendelssohn. As such, I improvised with a bust I already owned of Michelangelo’s David. 

To teach myself how the AutoDesk ReCap functioned, I placed David onto a table lined with newspaper. The newspaper was used to create a messier background for the ReCap algorithms, which use clutter in photos to better triangulate an approximate the object’s shape. I took a hundred photos, the application’s limit, and then compiled it all into ReCap. I then generated a model, which looked like this:

Surprisingly accurate scan. The model had a rather odd lump on the top of the head, which was either due to the lighting of the room I took the photos in (glare confuses the algorithm) or because I took too many photos of the top of his head and it tried to fit them all in. The model was converted into an .obj file and could be imported to Rhino as a mesh. 

After I received the model of Felix Mendelssohn, I repeated the process. This time I took less photographs, due to it being smaller and less detailed, and tried to adjust for the head issues with David by avoiding as many top of head shots. 

This scan wasn’t nearly the quality I had hoped for, to be honest, but looking at my classmates’ own scans of their models, this seemed to be the best one could do with these particular busts. The fact that they weren’t very detailed, were an ivory white, and reflected light all made for a poor scan. I decided model, though crude, would work to my advantage with the next portion of the project: abstraction to landscape. In fact, that low-poly face would be the main feature.