This is a 3D model of a Guardian Lion sculpture carved in Limestone "mounted originally seated upright on the vedika railing at the one of the entrances to the pradakshinapatha" and currently in the possession of the British Museum. It was produced from 297 photographs taken by Daniel Pett, and assembled in Metashape Pro by myself. The model can be downloaded from this site here.

I took the images to rebuild the 3D model of the Guardian Lion for myself. I took a look through to see if there were any images that I would not want to include, but ended up using all of them because none jumped out as low quality. I chose not to use the masks and instead made use of the bounding box and deleted junk data manully. After building the model, I continued using Metashape Pro to close holes in the mesh. Additionally, I normalized the model's rotation and position in the coordinate system, as well as scaling it based on the measurements provided in the original repository. Since I couldn't be sure of exactly how the measurements were taken, the scale might be a little off. I made a scale bar for all three measurements, however, and hope that helps keep it a bit more accurate. Once the textures were sorted, I exported the model as a GLTF and found a 3D model viewer that would let me embed it in an html page.

There was one big mistake that I made in this process that cost me a lot of time: I had set the quality too high when building the model. Not only did I spend a long time waiting for it to finish processing, but the final model is difficult to work with and exceeds the capabilities of the model viewer (hopefully I've fixed it and you can see the model above, but if not this is why it's missing from the page). Also, when I tried to import it into Blender to decimate the model, I ran into performance issues and crashes.

Photographs by Daniel Pett dpett@britishmuseum.org, Digital Humanities Lead, British Museum Copyright Trustees of the British Museum