The following project is a 3D model of a Buddha Preaching sculpture that currently lives in the British Museum. To do this project I utilized a set of images of the sculpture from the British Museum Digital Humanities GitHub; this is a repository for code and 3D modelling made by the British Museum curatorial and digital staff. The file containing the information on the piece that I used can be found here.

To do this project I used Metashape, and I had to begin my 30-day free trial to be able to save and export my model. I used masks to help with the cleaning of the data, so that the placement of pixels was more precise, and therefore building the dense cloud would be more efficient and it would give me a better result. I also selected the most important pixels and removed the ones that were not relevant (which was considerably easier than usual because the masks did a great job); this was also done with the purpose of having a better mesh and speeding up the process of creating it.

The problem with all this data cleaning is that I was too aggressive with my cleaning techniques so there was a big hole on the back of my model once I was done building the mesh. However, this was not only due to my intensive data cleaning; in the pictures that I used, this part is covered in shadow (because there is another statue behind this one so it was probably hard to get a good picture with light of this part of the buddha), so Metashape could not understand what was there.

To solve this, I used the “Close Holes” features, but not even that way Metashape was able to fill it in perfectly. Consequently, there is a brown patch on the back of the buddha and some little holes there. Therefore, I see that an opportunity for improvement of this project would be to take better pictures of the back of the buddha, so that we can get the correct structure and texture of the sculpture.

Once past the problems with the mesh I moved on to generate the texture, which, as I mentioned before, only had troubles with the brown patch that is covered by shadows in the original picture. However, I think that the result was amazing. In fact, too amazing. I say this because the model ended up being to heavy to export it because of its high quality, so I had to decimate the mesh in order to be able to export it (this only crushed my heart a little bit). A picture of the high quality model can be seen bellow.

The decimated version of the model that I was able to upload is shown bellow. You can play around with this one.

As you can see the quality of the model is a little bit lower, but I guess that’s the price we must pay to make it more accessible.

This project is very useful to people who wish to study this particular piece as it will allow them to turn it and move it around without the danger of breaking, and a lot of people can do it at the same time! It is also better than pictures because it is condensed into one model and it saves us the pain of scrolling through the pictures. The model is also good to see tiny details that my be harder to catch in the pictures because of the quality that is lost when we zoom into a picture; for instance, I was able to see the people that are carved on the stone where the buddha is sitting.

It is also useful for people who are simply interested in the model and wish to see it better. Especially if they, like me, live a little bit far from the British Museum.