Teaching Museums How to Produce 3D Content

On May 2nd 2017, I hopped aboard the 9.15 from Paddington Station in London to make the short journey to the city of Reading. I had been invited by Adam Koszary, Project Manager at The Museum of English Rural Life, to pay a visit to the museum and introduce staff to the concept of 3D for cultural heritage as well as train a small group in the art of photogrammetry (producing 3D content from digital images).

View the results at the bottom of the post!

Unlike other communities on Sketchfab – i.e. video game makers, 3D artists, VR enthusiasts –  the majority of staff from the cultural heritage sector (archivists, archaeologists, librarians, curators etc.) do not have a backgound in 3D. Sometimes they might not even have a notion of how 3D might be relevant to their work.

Despite the growing number of musuems publishing 3D on Sketchfab (we host 500+ museums and non-profits to date) it is still fairly rare, especially for smaller insititutions, for museums to have an in-house 3D production team.

quick straw poll before our #MW17 3D wrkshop on Friday: How does your museum (not you personally) use / create 3D right now?
Pls RT!

— Thomas Flynn (@nebulousflynn) April 19, 2017

One of my tasks as Cultural Heritage Lead, then, is to share my experience of creating 3D and excite people about the potential of the medium. More specifically, I want to help bridge the skills gap of 3D digitisation that exists within many museums of all sizes by providing introductory workshops in making 3D via photogrmmetry. “Teach a man to create 3D fish” and all that…

In the day workshop at MERL, we covered basic 3D concepts like verts, faces, meshes and textures followed by a photography session. We then moved on to processing images into 3D using photogrammetry software and finally uploading to Skecthfab, setting up for VR and sharing online.

From real wall @TheMERL to 3D VR thanks to @Sketchfab @nebulousflynn pic.twitter.com/6FsRXdPeN9

— Adam Lines (@AdamCLines) May 2, 2017

Fortunately for me, the participants at this workshop were fast learners and picked up the rudiments of photogrammetry very quickly as you can see from the playlist below – remember these models were made by people who had no previous experience making 3D!

As I see it, the field of 3D for cultural heritage is wide open for creative individuals to invent new experiences in 3D as the ability to create and share 3D content becomes affordable and easy to use. What will you create?

Sketchfab offers free Business accounts to museums and cultural organisations. If you are interested publishing 3D on Sketchfab or learning how to make 3D for your museum please drop us a message on museums@sketchfab.com.