Moses (beta)

I recently purchased a 24 megapixel Sony Alpha 5100. It is a massive leap in terms of resolution and much lighter than the last DSLR I had been using. I also purchased several adapters and various lenses like the Jupiter 3, the Industar and a Helios. While they are Soviet-era glass, they have proven to be ever bit as good as any Zeiss glass and far more affordable. They are manual focus only, which is why this Moses is currently a beta.

I set up my camera on a tripod, focused and slowly and thoughtfully took over 300+ photos over two days with deeply overcast skies. The display photo was taken a short time afterwards as the skies broke.

My method of choice is to now run all the RAW photos through Photomatix Pro to create HDR photos, but at a sensible and conservative level without being garish. I then double check the results from photo to photo to make sure they're all evenly lit and exposed to improve my chances of success with Photoscan Pro.

I then place all the resulting Photomatix Pro TIFs into a folder, fire up Photoscan Pro and open the folder and use the low setting to begin creating the model. Once I have a sparse cloud, I adjust the bounding box to exclude the extraneous surrounding material from Moses and go on to create the dense cloud and finally the mesh. At this point, even though I've used the low setting, the model is sufficiently detailed that I could choose to go on with the final texture stage, but for this instance I wanted to go all out. I created masks from the model and started over, but at the high setting.

I don't have the fastest Mac Pro so it takes time. My particular machine is an early 2009 Mac Pro with 32 gigs of RAM. I've updated the CPU from the original 2.66 GHz intel quad core to a 3.33 GHz hexacore with turboboost and hyper threading. I also removed the original Nvidia Geforce GTX 120 GPU and replaced it with a Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 to give me a boost in processing power. I probably could have done more, but I'm on a budget these days.

From beginning to end, with some breaks when I went out and missed the process finishing, this model took roughly two to three days. It is a beta and looks rough in spots since I am using manual focus glass and can't use the painters pole to get clear, sharp photos (yet). In another month or two, I'll invest in some inexpensive autofocus glass from Sony so I can finally pole-mount the camera and remotely fire it and capture the currently hidden parts of the sculpture, like the top of his head, his shoulders, etc. The photo at this link gives a sense of how high off the ground the uppermost parts of Moses are: https://goo.gl/0IyzMg (Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm a tubby short guy, lol).

I was comparing the results so far against an older version of Moses from over a year ago and could see how much more detailed this one will be. It still won't be a precise inch-for-inch replica, but it'll be the best I've done yet.

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