Section of a frieze, 1916

thingiverse

During my last visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I stumbled upon a captivating polychrome terra-cotta architectural frieze fragment that caught my eye. Created by George Grant Elmslie, the chief draftsman for architect Louis Sullivan, this piece was originally part of the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Hector, MN. Fortunately, it was preserved during a remodel of the bank in 1970 and is now on display in Room G300, alongside other notable Frank Lloyd Wright items. To learn more about this fascinating piece, visit the following webpage: http://collections.artsmia.org/art/1965/section-of-a-frieze-george-grant-elmslie As I designed this 3D model, I was nearing the end of a long day and feeling drained from photographing almost non-stop since opening time that morning. With one battery already depleted and another close to exhaustion, I decided to take on a challenging project - modeling the frieze with fewer photos than usual. Typically, I photograph objects with an abundance of overlap from every angle possible. However, due to my fatigue and limited reach with my tripod, I had to be more careless about focus, resulting in blurry images. Furthermore, without an AF lens, I couldn't take handheld photos with the limited museum display lighting, leaving out crucial details at the top of the frieze. One model features a textured surface but lacks essential sides, bottom, top, or rear elements necessary for printing. The other model has a rough body created via Meshmixer for printing purposes. Despite these limitations, I shot all photos in RAW mode and corrected exposure, color, and sharpness using Lightroom before exporting them as 8-bit TIFs. In Photoscan, I applied Medium settings throughout the process to achieve this model. Additionally, I performed mesh decimation and extrusion in Meshmixer to refine the final STL file, while the OBJ model underwent less extensive editing. I hope you enjoy this model and consider visiting the original piece at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.