Scan Stitching Round 1

itching of the scanned cervical vertebrae of Thoracosaurus neocesariensis has begun. C1-C4 have been put together. They each consisted of about 8-12 scans (for different angles) which had to be combined. It is a laborious process, and I have to say I much prefer piecing in the physical world with glue than in the digital world. This is mostly because of how slow it gets with the amount of geometry that Geomagic Studio 11 is trying to handle. Don't get me wrong, it's so much nicer than the old software we had, but it still starts to get clunky. Also, in the physical world you can feel when things click into place a lot of times, letting you know that that's exactly how the piece fits. In the digital world it's all visual, which brings me to another challenge. With the virtual scans, the points that are further away from the focal point of the scanner's lens become rougher and less accurate due to the focal distance of the lens. This means that using points closer to the edges of the scans as registration points becomes more and more difficult to do. Also, there's the issue of the complexity of the fossils, with many crevices that it is difficult to gather sufficient data from with the scanner. Geomagic has ways to fill holes, which works pretty well a lot of the time, but also introduces a degree of innaccuracy. Some of the more complex objects, also have larger holes, which might call for a second scanning session, although the same problems will just arise again. We may be able to infer the missing parts through hand modeling with reference photographs, and looking at the other scanned bones of the same type for reference as well.