The vessels can be presented either as scanned, no-texture files as this 3 D model of the Wipperow vessel
3D Scans
The Ceramic Technologies Digital Library (CTDL) is using a portable Konica-Minolta 3 D laser scanner to obtain scans of whole or reconstructed ceramic vessels. Each scan represents an accurate virtual image of the real object, and their merging recreates the object in a virtual environment.
The merged scans provide the first sight of the 3 D vessel as a whole, and on this basis the polygon mesh is built. A vessel can have up to a half a million scanned points, although at such resolution the file is of considerable size reaching hundreds of megabytes (in .cdk format).
The subsequent stage is where the pixelated texture is applied to the mesh, this being nothing less than a perfect 3 D reproduction of the object in reality. The scans provide the most accurate replication of the surface of the vessel, and the color information contained by each pixel helps in a faithful surface rendition.
The last stage is the 'shape' stage, where on the basis of 3 D information gathered, the software generates a 'best-to-fit' model that can be used for further modelling. The model can be useful especially for proto-typing, thus opening the path of full-sized or scaled replication of the original.
or as a 3 D model with texture applied 
October 19, 2007
