Quartzite blocks

thingiverse

Sioux Falls was built on a bedrock of quartzite. In the 19th century, settlers arrived to find wood in short supply. After Sioux Falls established itself, local business leaders recognized that the pink quartzite formations rising in great ripples and low plateaus could be quarried for street pavers, buildings, and other structures. I'm not certain where this particular pile of quartzite blocks originated. The stack sits on the west side of Falls Park amidst grass, trees, and more unquarried quartzite pushing out of the ground. I thought it might be enjoyable to create a model just to see how much detail I could capture. To Design This I used an LG G4 phone to snap all 59 photos in manual mode with raw/DNG settings. At home, I imported the images into Adobe Lightroom where I worked to even out exposures, sharpened details, and boosted contrast slightly. After a final review, I exported the images as 300ppi JPGs. I should have used TIFs instead of JPGs, but I wasn't sure it would make much of a difference. Next, I imported the folder containing the photos into Agisoft Photoscan, using 'High' settings from sparse cloud creation to dense cloud generation and finally to mesh and texture output. When finished, I was surprised by the model's level of detail. If you look at the top of the pile, you can actually see an individual leaf that was rendered accurately even though it was extremely thin and sticking upwards. The model turned out too large to share, so I imported it into Autodesk Remake to carefully reduce mesh complexity while maintaining optimal details. Once satisfied, I exported the model. I'm still surprised by the level of detail in this greatly reduced model.