Intro

Over the past summer of my junior year I completed an internship with the university’s paleontology department. My role was to assist the department and The Academy of Natural Sciences in creating a digital achieve of their fossil collections. This meant using photogrammetry and other computer graphics tools to build accurate models in 3D. As a fun bonus on Fridays I got to attend the lab’s dig days where we traveled to an excavation site in New Jersey and conducted field work.

Sturgeon Project

The first project that I was assigned to was to create a scan of a mound containing several dozen fossils. The mound of dirt was to fragile too put on the laser scanner so we instead had to use photogrammetry. The process for this was to take several dozen photos, for every different angle, then using a program by Agisoft stitch the photographs together to create a model. Below you can see the exhibit and the 3D model we created from the photo set. The geometry is really dense, but was needed to provide the grad students with enough detail to thoroughly examine it. In between this project I was also helping to scan other specimens in the collection.

Dryptosourus Project

The following major project I was assigned to was to take a recently completed fossil scan from The Academy of Natural Science and accurately layout the bones. The grad students provided me with a paper which illustrated the species bone structure and explained a lot of the thermology to me. From there I brought the individual scans into Maya and arranged them. The most challenging part was that scans were high poly count, since the researchers want to be able to see every detail on the bone, which really slowed down Maya. I ended up creating proxy geo then swapping the proxy geo out for the full resolution was I was happy with the results. The hope is that one day The Academy will be able to use this 3D model to create material for their exhibit.

Orkoraptor Project

My final internship project was model an Orkoraptor, which is a sub species of raptor. Since I had just completed the bone structure model for dryptosourus, which is also a raptor, the idea was to take  that knowledge and apply it. A grad student is working on virtual reality exhibit for The Academy and needed extra models to fill out the world so while my model did need to scientifically accurate it did not have to be hero model perfect.  This was great for me because I had just completed an organic modeling course and was interested in trying a new project. The most challenging area was the lower legs. Most of the other parts I was able to apply anatomy structure from other creatures or were really tubular. The legs though required research to understand in the end I pulled a lot from looking at ostrich legs since they a similar bone structure.