Today we bring a bust of the German communist leader Ernst Thälmann, made by the German sculptor J.F. Rogge. The sculptor recognized by his busts and monuments first of the leaders of the German National Socialist and after World War II of the communist leaders. Thus many of his works are elaborated on photographs of the characters portrayed with whom he was not always contemporary.
In this case the sculpture of 1959 portrays Ernst Thälmann fifteen years after his execution and after spending eleven years imprisoned by the Nazi government, after being arrested in 1933.
This bronze on a granite base leaves the neck open and you can see the interior void of the piece. In the case of the 3d model we have only closed the gap without rebuilding all the interior due to the impossibility of photographing it and not wanting overload the 3D model with invisible geometry.
Altogether we used 75 images to reconstruct this model of 10x20x30 cm creating a final version optimized for the browser 11882 polygons. To improve the quality of our models this time we have introduced some additional textures.
First we have separated the shadows of the sculpture itself, creating a texture for the color called albedo and another one for the diffuse shadows called Ambient Occlusion (AO).
Subsequently, we have created the normal map and the elevation map. The two replace the information lost by reducing the model to view it in the browser. The normal map holds orientation information, which works very well with light. The elevation map using tessellations model allows us to recover the original geometry in applications like our Virtual Hall.
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