rotation platform.
The course "Creating Digital Collections'" attended at Maastricht University has been taught by the course coordinators Dr. Costas Papadopoulos, Prof. dr Susan Schreibman and PhD candidate at FASoS and researcher at PURE3D, Kelly Gillikin Schoueri, during period 4. During this course, we as creators, had the privilege of digitising a toy into a 3D digital scholarly edition using the Metashape Agisoft software and the platform of Voyager and PURE3D to create interactive tours discussing the historical, societal and cultural aspects of the toy that fill the collection titled "Toys with Voice".
The first step in the process of digitising the toy was to capture the toy, in this case, a wizard produced by the company Schleich, by using photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is the "art, science, and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring, and interpreting photographic images," according to the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (1989, p. 979). In the first skills section, we were introduced to a Canon DSLR camera, its settings and the lightbox and spinning platform that will enable the capturing process of the wizard better.
We were instructed to capture the wizard from as many angles as possible, preferably 12-18 images per rotation. By using a rotation platform we made sure details were not missing and the shadows that were from the toy itself were limited to none. The wizard has been captured in three rotations that included; the front of the wizard, a bottom angle rotation of the wizard, and lastly a rotation from up top. The wizard was positioned in styrofoam to have a stable platform and that same foam could be used to capture the wizard from underneath. The first digitisation process was hectic, but we did manage to capture a lot of the toy and used baby powder to counteract the reflection of the toy. The zoom levels were not all the same which is why a second session of capturing the toy was needed. After aligning the photos and constructing the model, the following aspects of the wizard were problematic; the hat, the cloak, the feet and the hands.
