Greek Slave

KAREN LEMMEY: My name is Karen Lemmey. I am the curator of sculpture at Smithsonian American Art Museum. We are standing in the Octagon room a space designed by architect James Renwick specifically to showcase the Greek slave, the crown jewel of William Corcoran’s collection.

Between 1844 and 1869 Powers’ studio produced six full scale replicas of the Greek slave in marble using the technology of his day. In 2015 the Smithsonian scanned Powers’ plaster prototype of the Greek slave and the scan captured all of the point marks as well as the loop that was used to suspend and support the pointing machine. We have used this 3D scan to create a glass filled polymer replica of the Greek slave using 3D printing, the technology of our day.

VINCE ROSSI: I’m Vince Rossi. I work for the Digitization Program Office. I’m here today with my colleague Jonathan Blundell, and we’re 3D scanning the sculpture that you see behind me today. This is a Hiram Powers sculpture, and we’re using three different types of scanning technologies. One is a laser scanner, where we’re painting light on top of an object – on top of this object – and we’re capturing millions and millions of data points that describe the surface. That captures very high-resolution detail, but it doesn’t capture color information. We’re also using a structured light scanner, which is another handheld tool, which is slightly lower-resolution, but it also captures some color information. And then finally, we see Jon getting set up. He’s shooting photogrammetry. That’s where we use a DSLR camera, and we take photographs in such a way that we can create a 3D reconstructed model using photogrammetry algorithms.

So those three data sets we’re capturing have different strengths and weaknesses, and what we’re going to do is take those three different data sets and basically combine them to create one high-resolution geometric model, with accurate color information, that we will then deliver online using our 3D viewer at 3d.si.edu.