The 4 artifacts I was able to 3D scan were the mummy of a sacred ibis, a wooden lock for a door, an urn, and a 15th century hand carved wooden statue of Madonna and Child.
This project was a collaboration with Archeology student Carol Anne Barsody, as well as the Johnson Museum at Cornell University. To create these 3D scans I used an open source software tool called Meshroom. I set up the artifact on a stand with even lighting, and took about 100-500 pictures (depending on the complexity of the surface), and input them into the meshroom program. If the scan was successful, I take the rough output into Blender (another open source tool), remove the extraneous surfaces from the scan, smooth out the mesh, and patch any holes. Due to the nature of the scan, the bottom of the object was always left empty, so even with a perfect scan it is necessary to patch. Finally, I run the repaired mesh back through the texturing step of the pipeline to generate a final texture. In addition to full 360 3D scans, I also created printable verions which we outsourced to create full size 3D prints of the artifacts.
The image on the left is the point cloud and estimated camera angles generated at an intermediate step in the pipeline.
I was interviewed about this work for the Cornell Chronical, CNN, Nature, and the Smithsonian.
Please also see Dr. Adam's page on the project with interactive models.