Murray Family Monument

thingiverse

Here's another late 19th century family monument at St Michaels Catholic Cemetery in Sioux Falls, SD, perfect for practicing my hobby thanks to its multi-veined stone, weathering, and lichen growth in patches all over it. I used my nifty fifty manual focus lens with my Nikon D200 on manual settings at f22 ISO 100 in RAW format, then set up a tripod with a cable shutter release to minimize vibration. It was a partly cloudy day when I started photographing the stone, but Mother Nature has a funny way of sometimes throwing little monkey wrenches into my photographic sessions. In some of my photos, they were mostly even and well exposed as planned, thanks to cloud filtering and softening the sun. But in others, the sun suddenly burst out - and since I'd had too much Diet Coke beforehand, there wasn't a loo in sight! Luckily, I shot everything in RAW format, allowing me to compensate at home after importing the photos into Adobe Lightroom. I exported them as 16-bit TIF at full size and then imported them into Agisoft Photoscan. Normally, I would have masked them first but today I was feeling a little lazy. After all images had been aligned by Photoscan, I adjusted the bounding box to build a dense cloud model for just the monument. I created the dense cloud using ultra-high quality settings, then used maximum possible settings when building the mesh. The resulting model seemed to be a bit soft in terms of details - but I attribute this mainly to the monument's condition after almost 125 years of harsh South Dakota weather. To manage this issue, I decided to decimate it within Meshlab as its original OBJ file was an imposing 1.8 GB.