Reflection of the 3D scholarly process - Florence

The digitization of the Funko Pop Sansa Stark was a long and thorough project filled with up and downs. The goal of this course is to create a digital collection with 3D models at its centre by considering the ethical, methodological, theoretical, and practical issues regarding collecting, representation, reconstruction, and reproduction. Let’s start at the beginning with the first part of this course which consists of the literary research and creation of the model with the Metashape tool. During the first few weeks dedicated to this course, we did a lot of research concerning the hidden details, the meaning, and the cultural and historical background of what is often considered a “simple toy” but is filled with context. At first, we struggle to find more than 5 leads to explore regarding our Sansa Stark Funko Pop! Personally, at first, I wondered how this project was going to be feasible, since it was only an object after all, what could be said in multiple articles? Well, little by little throughout tutorials sessions with our tutors and my partner, we started to establish categories and annotation diagrams to be analysed. Furthermore, in parallel, we started creating the model by doing a session to capture Sansa via multiple photos of the object upright and upside down to get the fully detailed toy in Metashape. This first step is known as photogrammetry, and it took us two tries to get good-quality photos without moving the object. Afterward, we started the whole process in Metashape by aligning photos, cleaning the model of extras, building, and then smoothing the model. By the end of running all these steps, we encountered some issues with the final one which is the merging of the two chunks. Indeed, they didn’t align properly, and they overlapped perpendicularly. Therefore, we took the decision to only submit one of the chunks, to obtain satisfactory results. However, as the model itself is at the center of the tours on Voyager, we asked the tutors for some help with the merging situations in order to display all the features and details of the object. This was also crucial for us, as the details on the bottom of the toys, for example, are part of the annotations within our tours. 

This leads me to the second part of this project with the virtual tours within the Voyager tool. After our introduction tutorials of the Voyager workspace, I felt confident that it was more intuitive than Metashape. Indeed, the whole process of creating the tours felt smoother and less stressful than the Metashape part which was time-consuming and frustrating at times. The Voyager tools allow you to be creative within each step while still bringing further information and insight into the toy. The star of the show is the Sansa Stark Funko Pop at the centre of the tours, and the annotations, articles, and multimedia are there to bring further insights and clarity to the toy.

Although this work was complex, that only made the whole project more rewarding. Working on this both theoretically and practically has been most gratifying. During this course, I have been learning project management, working in pairs, managing my time, critically thinking, storytelling, and digitizing. However, naturally, we still faced some obstacles during the project. Here is a timeline of this 3D process and my reflections at each stage. 

If you're interested in more information concerning the reflective process, you can read my blog post: Reflection of the process