Since November I have been working on 3D capture data from St Piran’s Oratory. It has taken a long time to process the 3D photogrammetry data as it is a hugely complex task to record every stone. This process caused the untimely demise of my 5 year old MacBook Pro, which was struggling anyway. It’s 8GB RAM just couldn’t cope, with the sheer quantities of data, and then the screen began to flash purple, before randomly restarting. Or just turning off. Recording the remains of this old building finished it off. Hence the tabloid-esque title of this blog post…
Happily, colleagues at Archaeovision stepped in to help (thanks James), and I have been able to deliver the (300 million points) raw data to the client, along with a textured mesh of the Oratory and surrounding Scheduled concrete, and a series of orthographic renders of each elevation.
I have since been able to purchase a new computer – an iMac Retina 5K with i7 4Ghz, 32GB RAM, SSD, and upgraded graphics. The screen is gorgeous – so crisp – it makes going back to using a ‘normal’ screen quite difficult. It’s the perfect balance for me in terms of display quality and performance.
The header image of this post shows the last stage of this project. I am rendering a short animation of the chapel structure to help people visualise it without its concrete shelter.
Since the concrete walls surrounding St Piran’s Oratory do not allow enough clearance for conventional photography, this has proven to be a very useful exercise to record and understand the structure that we see today – a confection of medieval to 20th century rebuilding and repair.
When the animation is available publicly, I will post a link here. I also hope to upload a model of the unencumbered Oratory to Sketchfab so that it can be inspected at will. I will post that on this site in a new blog post when it is ready.