A Grad Student’s Experience at the Scanning of the Ruthwell Cross

I have been urged to share my experiences as a graduate student of this past trip to do the 3D scanning of the Ruthwell cross. At the time I was putting it off to be honest, as the early mornings and late nights made writing anything cohesive a bit of a struggle. But now that the whirlwind of activity has finally started to calm down I think I have the strength back to make a little bit of sense. Read More

Ruthwell aftermath

Back from the Ruthwell Cross scanning week, and what an amazing experience that was!

First of all, thanks to Dan’s work organizing the preliminary set up (scaffolding, bubble wrapping, making room for all the tech gear we brought in, etc.) everything was ready for the scan when we arrived. And everything went incredibly smooth, too: the only glitch we experienced was when one of plugs took down electricity for the whole building when we used it for the vacuum cleaner; moved it to another one, problem solved. Read More

Second day data

Thursday was the second day of scanning and photography (pictures of the scanning work can be found here). On Wednesday, we finished the top 1.5 metres or so of the cross from the 2 metre lift. On Thursday morning, the team from Solway construction came and removed the top level of scaffolding and we scanned and photographed the next metre or so (roughly equivalent to the Magdalen panel on the South face). After lunch the team from Solway came back and removed the rest of scaffolding and we began working on the lower half of the cross from the church floor and pit. Read More

Some preliminary results

The results of the first day’s scanning are starting to come in. Some amazing photography and the first preliminary 3D point clouds to check we were getting it all. Hopefully we’ll be able to post some screen shots tonight or tomorrow (see below for some comments on the video)

This evening we went back after dark to redo the even light photography and some heavily raked shots (The link takes you to a couple of reduced examples). Some of the panels and the runes look like they are really popping out. Very interesting photography and a real benefit of being able to get up so close. Read More

First day scanning

We’re about to start the first day scanning.

Yesterday the scaffolding went up (pictures available from our flikr account), and Matteo, Marco, Roberto, and I went up for a quick recce. First finding: there’s some pencil annotations on the top of the cross piece. The top was too dusty to read them reliably yet, but hopefully we’ll know more in a few hours. Read More