Plaster Decoration from Washington Pavilion

thingiverse

While browsing Zandbroz Variety in downtown Sioux Falls, I strolled to the rear of the store, where it boasts a compact antiques and vintage section. As I explored this area, my eyes landed on a historic architectural salvage fragment from the former Washington High School. Following the closure of Washington High School, the community passionately debated what to do with the iconic building. It was a cherished landmark that had stood proudly since the early 1900s in the heart of downtown Sioux Falls. Over the years, there had been several additions and the city grew outward, gradually surrounding it and drawing it into the downtown area. After much deliberation, it was decided that the former high school would be transformed into the Washington Pavilion. Today, it serves as a home to an art museum, a science center, a theater, a cinema dome, and a cozy restaurant. To learn more about the Washington Pavilion, simply click here: goo.gl/ImHvqo How I Crafted This At Zandbroz, this stunning plaster architectural fragment is proudly displayed on the wall behind an antique display counter, making it quite challenging to capture. Initially, I attempted to photograph it from directly opposite but was left disappointed with the results. On my second attempt, I carefully stepped behind the vintage counter, skillfully avoiding other antiques standing in its shadow. Using my iPhone 6 Plus, I took a total of 33 photos, but unfortunately, I couldn't quite reach high enough to capture the intricate surfaces at the top of the plaster decoration. To compensate for this limitation, I strategically took numerous overlapping photos in a deliberate lawn-mower pattern before rotating my camera at an oblique angle to better capture the depth and relief from the sides. Unfortunately, the lighting conditions were far from ideal, and as the resulting photos were heavily downsampled JPGs, I was unable to adequately recover blown-out spots or deep shadows. In the future, I plan to return with a regular camera and try again – assuming it hasn't been sold by then! Within Agisoft Photoscan, I imported all 33 photos into a folder on my desktop. Using the 'High' setting for matching all the photos created a sparse point cloud. After carefully tweaking the bounding box to only include the decoration, I employed the 'High' setting to generate a dense point cloud. Additionally, I utilized the minimal setting to address the depth maps and then used the 'High' setting to create the mesh and standard color-averaging in mosaic creation for the texture. Despite these efforts, I still encountered several artifacts where the chartruese wall was included, so I attempted to trim the model without sacrificing too much detail.