Having benefitted so hugely from 3D models that Heinrich Mallison made for me — most notably, the Xenoposeidon model that is the supplementary data file for the recent preprint — I realised the time has come for me to learn to do this for myself. To that end, I am going to read all the tutorials he’s written on the subject. This page is a link-farm to those tutorials, which I made for my own benefit, but which I hope others will also benefit from.

• 1: equipment
• 2: picture taking, general remarks
• 3: turntables
• 4: bulky stuff
• 5: a little visual aid for you
• 6: building a model from the photos
• 7: multi-chunk project handling
• 8: scaling “with hindsight”
• 9: Quick and dirty!
• 10: an improved method for mid-sized objects
• 11: How to handle a project in Agisoft Photoscan
• add-on: The consequences of optimizing a sparse point cloud
• 12: How to preserve strike and dip or cardinal directions in your 3D model
• (unnumbered) Speeding up Photoscan’s dense cloud generation

There is also Heinrich’s paper, with Oliver Wings, Photogrammetry in paleontology – a practical guide (Mallison and Wings 2014), which he announced in its own blog-post.

Reference

• Mallison, Heinrich, and Oliver Wings. 2014. Photogrammetry in paleontology – a practical guide. Journal of Paleontological Techniques 12:1-31.