Category: 3D
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Hendraburnick ‘Quoit’ – the most decorated stone in southern Britain?
In 2016 I was asked by Dr Andy Jones from Cornwall Archaeological Unit to record and study the surface of Hendraburnick Quoit on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. The work, funded by Cornwall Archaeological Society, involved detailed 3D recording of the surface of the two stones that comprise the monument (which isn’t actually a quoit, but…
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Point Cloud Penzance – the town in 3D
Using 3D data (LiDAR) collected by the Environment Agency through the Government Open Data initiative I have created an interactive 3D model of the town centre of Penzance, Cornwall. It’s a very detailed model, with a measurement point every 50cm or so across the entire town. There are 12.9 million vertices (points) in this model. You…
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3D Printed Replica of the Mermaid of Zennor
In August 2015 I was commissioned by National Maritime Museum Cornwall to produce a 3D printed replica of the late medieval bench end in the church of St Senara in Zennor. It depicts a mermaid, which is famously known as the Mermaid of Zennor. This has, along with another medieval bench end, been incorporated into a…
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On Sketchfab and Cultural Heritage
When I first started out with learning 3D visualisation techniques and software back in 2001 I longed for a way to share my models online. In the early days there was VRML and other, proprietary, methods (Superscape, Shockwave 3D, etc) but these required either big browser plugins with limited capabilities or in the case of VRML,…
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Interactive 3D Models on Sketchfab
Publishing 3D models online used to be a pain. It always relied upon plugins, and the results could never be very detailed. Sketchfab has changed all of that, and made publishing beautifully detailed 3D models a breeze. You could use the analogy that Sketchfab is a kind of YouTube for 3D models. It is also…
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3D Excavation Snapshot – St Piran’s Oratory in March 2014
Earlier this year (2014), I was asked to record a rather unglamourous pile of concrete rubble. It was within the boundary of a Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM), and for health and safety reasons – very good ones – needed to be removed to allow the re-excavation of the medieval St Piran’s Oratory to continue.
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Carwynnen Quoit
Earlier this year I was commissioned by Sustrust to digitally reconstruct the then-collapsed Carwynnen Quoit, a neolithic dolmen, using existing 3D laser scan data. This would be used to inform the physical reconstruction of the monument. I was also asked to investigate and report on a number of stones adjacent to the quoit which were…
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The Mermaid of Zennor – a low-fi 3D scan
At the weekend I had the chance to visit the church of St Senara in Zennor, Cornwall. I spent some time looking at the wonderful medieval carving of the famous mermaid. Despite not having my Canon DSLR with me, I decided to take a series of photos with my iPhone 4S (8MP) with the view…
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Reprocessing the St John the Evangelist data from Gulval
Since first posting about the images of the Four Evangelists found on the medieval cross-base at Gulval Church, I have been striving to produce clearer images of each saint for inclusion in a publication. The image will only ever be as good as the condition of the stone allows, but it is possible to wring…
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A Medieval Discovery at Gulval Church, Cornwall
[Update] This work has now been published with Prof. Michelle Brown in British Archaeology. Just to the left of the south porch of Gulval Church, near Penzance in Cornwall, lies a large block of granite. I first came across it on a visit to the churchyard in 2012. However, it really piqued my interest a…