Workflow of the Project

I've had the idea to build a site where you can interact with 3D objects in a story map kind of way, all for free, since the beginning of the semester. I'll be doing a more intense version of this for a project over the summer, so this was going to be a prcatice run. Ever since my Greek/Roman and (later) Jewish magic course, I've been really into the Aramaic incantation bowls that the museum has. I found one in the online collections that had legible script, a visible illustration, was mostly complete, and had a translation. I got these translations from a book by James Montgomery (which I cite on the home page) that my previous professor, Dr. Simcha Gross, kindly provided (thank you!). From there, I got into the digitization.

I modeled the bowl using the tablet-controlled turntable and my iPhone (13 mini). I put about 250 pictures into Reality Capture and it created two halves (inside and outside). I had to filter out the bag that the bowl sat on, and just generally clean up the two halves so they could come together cleanly. I used Cloud Compare to align the halves and Mesh Lab to merge them.

I quickly realized that every software had trouble applying the texture map, and didn't really know why. After looking up a way to troubleshoot, Blender appeared to be the best option.

I tried a lot of different projections that didn't work, and in the end I finally fixed the problem through UV map editing. This took many hours of watching different youtube tutorials, as well as many cups of coffee. I just had to flip the mesh map around the x and y axis, and it applied correctly. I then exported it as a .glb, because it is a more compressed file (better for web rendering, especially because the color/texture is baked in).

I used Glitch to build a site with a model viewer component, so the user can interact with the model. I also added annotations to provide extra context (and make it fun). This, of course, makes it sound easy... but I defintely didn't look to Glitch first, and even when I did, I was messing around trying to make React and/or Three.js work. I am not well-versed in javascript, so I was defintely in over my head. This was a long 20 hours (I'm serious) of working with no progress, and I think I lost something of myself in the process, but I also gained a new skill! In the end, I figured out how to use model viewer, decided Glitch was a reliable builder for such a small project, and spent another 6+ hours making sure everything looked good (working with progress, how rare and exciting).