I was recently watching a video on YouTube (We 3D Scanned a GHOST TOWN to Preserve it Forever) from the channel Corridor Crew, where they went to visit an abandoned mining ghost town to help a fellow YouTuber Brent from Ghost Town Living preserve the town. Corridor Crew had gone down there to 3D scan the entire town to preserve it forever digitally. They did this using two different processes, LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry, both done using the iPhone and web app Polycam. But I will be talking about photogrammetry and how it can be used to preserve buildings and items.
Photogrammetry is the process of creating a 3D model from photos. Yesterday I went down to the hydraulic clock tower near the Middlesbrough football ground and took around 900 pictures with my DJI Mavic Air 2; I didn’t know that Polycam only allows a maximum of 250 photos per scan. When I got home, I unloaded all the pictures onto my laptop, selected 250 of them, and uploaded them to polycam. After the images were uploaded and the model was created, I could download the 3D model of the clock tower I was just at.
You can get some great results with photogrammetry, but the results can be rough with larger objects. The model I got of the clock tower was great (seen above), but it is a bit rough, as I mentioned. I wouldn’t want the landscape present if I were to 3D print it, so I put the model into Microsofts 3D builder and removed all the land around the tower and used the smoothing function with an intensity of 3/6, and the results were even better. I was also able to 3D print it on my Elegoo Mars V2 Pro resin printer.
