JACS_Lab @ GWU

a little collective of graduate students using tech to study morphology

What can you find here?

Tutorials, tools, & techniques for the collection and analysis of morphological data. When we figure out how to do something cool, we share it here!

Background

We are a group of graduate students studying morphological form and function of extinct and living animals. Our research questions are varied and expanding. Currently, we are looking for accessable ways to capture digital data from specimens in museum and university collections. Often times, scientists have limited time and funding to travel and observe speciemens at length. Digitizing specimens of interest in three dimensional format can provide detailed models for observations once back in your own lab. Here, we will outline some of the entry-level techniques for capturing and creating 3D digital models of the external surfaces of specimens. These techniques are currently written for hard, stationary objects and structures, like bones and fossils. These techniques can be expanded to capture 3D surface data from living organisms, and may be a future topic of infomation found here.

Helpful Terms

Photogrammetry is a method of collecting photographs (digital still images) of a three dimensional object from multiple angles and stitching those images together with software to create a three dimensional model.

Hand held scanner is a tool that captures distance point measurements from some real object and translates this data into a 3D model. There are several ways that scanners can collect this data from the surface of your object, such as LiDAR, Structured Light, Laser Triangulation or SLAM Fusion. (This is an area beyond the current scope of this repository.)

3D Mesh is a 3D model built from a collection of polygons determined from reference points along X, Y and Z axes, produced from a collection of images (still or video capture) that define shapes with length, width and height.

Open Source refers to software that is open or free to anyone to use. We will mention if software used for projects here were free, open source or purchased. When applicable, we will provide links to source software and packages.