May 30 2015
Strawberry Hill is an internationally significant gothic revival house in Twickenham, built by Horace Walpole from 1747. It has recently undergone a major structural and decorative restoration to revive its eighteenth century appearance.
In an effort to make Strawberry Hill house accessible to the visually impaired, Strawberry Hill Trust has commissioned Vertex Modelling and Lee 3D to create 3D printed models of the architectural details of the interior as well as a 3D printed model of the entire house. Visitors taking tours designed for visually impaired people will be able to touch and handle these models as part of their tour.
“To create the 3D model of the house has been fairly straightforward,” says Michal Konicek from Vertex Modelling. “We have used high-resolution aerial imagery on our photogrammetry production line to capture a Level of Detail 3 (LOD3) model of the site. As LOD3 models do not have any façade details, this model has been upgraded by our 3D modellers to LOD4 using reference photographs and terrestrial photogrammetry. We used a similar technique for the architectural detailing 3D models.”
The digital model has been 3D printed by Lee 3D.
“This has been a very interesting project to work on and we are really proud to be part of it.” says George Lee, “Considering the end use, we chose to 3D print the models in plastic rather than plaster for durability. To enable the detailing to really stand out the resulting 3D printed model of the house was almost 50 cm wide and 26 cm tall. Due to its size the main model took almost 200 hours of 3D printing time to produce.”
“I am really pleased with the results of this project” says Nick Smith, Director of the Strawberry Hill House Trust “Our staff and volunteers have received training from Vocaleyes, an audio description charity, and have developed a tour for those with partial or no sight. These 3D printed models will be an excellent addition to this tour, for the first time allowing visually impaired visitors to fully appreciate the house and its unique architectural details.”
“At the end of the project we were given permission to make the 3D model available as a free download on CG Trader,” adds Michal, “Now people around the world can 3D print their own copy of Strawberry Hill House and appreciate this historic landmark in a new, previously impossible way.”