Hi there,
In have to scan some complete prehistoric vessels, some of them partly decorated with fine incisions. They are up to 50 cm in height.
How to achieve this goal best?
I think the objects arte to big for metrox, so i would use my miraco.
I have not very much experience on miraco, so:
should I scan handheld or stationary with turntable?
Can I switch from far to near mode in order to get the fine decorations?
How would YOU do this job?
Thanks in advance,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
As you requested (but I know you have a lot of experience and I’ve seen many of your beautiful works, for example: This is what I bought my Minis for: archaeological illustration ), I’ll tell you how I would do (or rather, try to) these scans.
The Miraco choice seems absolutely right to me, both for the type/size of the objects and the achievable/necessary quality.
I would prepare a set with the object on the turntable (the large one would be better) and use Miraco mounted on a tripod (one that’s adjustable in height) to maintain a uniform distance during the scan. Once I found the right settings, I would scan starting from the bottom and starting the rotation of the object (it’s necessary to do some testing to find the ideal rotation speed).
Once the first full rotation is completed, I would lock the turntable and stop the scan. At this point, I would raise the scanner, maintaining sufficient overlap with the already scanned part. Then restart the scanner and after the rotation of the turntable, and so on until completion.
As for the combined use of Far and Near modes, I’ve had the opportunity to use it by scanning the entire object in Far mode and then using Near mode (in the areas with the most features). In this case, you could try it; it might work on the areas with incised decorations. I’d use the scanner by hand for this step.
Thank you very much! I admire your works, too!
Unfortunately i have only the small TT, but I think it will do.
Single shot ist no idea? Want to avoid collecting too much data.
But as I understand, you would rather work by pause an resume than by stitching parts together.
At least for the bottom I have to reposition the vessels, but this should be easy to merge.
But why would you start from the bottom and not from the rim?
You can also use single-shot mode (but this requires starting/stopping/restarting the turntable multiple times and can be tedious). As for whether to start from the bottom instead of the rim, that’s a good question: you can also do it the other way around! 
Im meant: I have the Dual axis TT, not the very small one, but not the large TT for e.g. People.
Ok, there shouldn’t be any problems with the weight, I don’t know about the diameter of the base of the vases or the rim
Be careful with the DAT , especially with the artifacts , that it don’t tilt down by accident .
I don’t know the size of the artifacts but seeing the smooth no features of it, it is not going to be easy task so single shots with MIRACO will be the way to go .
If the size is not too big , you can place some small objects on the bottom of the turntable to keep the tracking while using single shot mode .
Those are the moments when you need Trackit for this kind of scanning situation and forget about the tracking for good .
When I scanned a vase in the past with MIRACO I just put some printed cubes around the bottom turntable , it was steady performance .
I’ve already scanned some protohistoric ceramics (similar to the ones in the photo), and they have small (and non-homogeneous) features and surfaces with variations in continuity. I think testing is the best approach to finding the right path. Good work, Daniel.
I will keep you updated.
How did you get on with this? I’d be interested to see the results.
Smaller vessels up to 20 cm in height were good to scan with metrox:
But there must be a bug in the newer software versions: with bigger vessels MetroX lost tracking very often in auto TT mode - without frames getting red. The surface of this pots is hand made and rich of features, so this can’t be the reason. I noticed it got better the more distance differenes were to be seen, e.g. the back and the front part of the rim in the FOV.
See this, there is only ONE knob on the real vessel:
With Miraco I scanned in continuous mode because I didn’t find the single shot button in the PC version of the software and so I got huge amounts of noisy data which didn’t satisfy me very well. It took very much time to process, even with i9 and 64gb ram.
This is about 70 cm in height. Overall it is good, but the incised decoration is whashed out, because I had to do it in far mode:
This is better, about 50 cm, but see the rim: merging went wrong…
I had only 7 hours to scan 8 vessels, so it was a race against time…
Thanks for sharing your results. A shame that there were problems, but I know only too well the pressure of having to scan many objects in very little (not enough) time. Maybe the laser modes of MetroX along with markers and unique objects around the base might be useful next time?
Did you try photogrammetry as a fallback?
