FreeFormFab

Robert Graham: The Virgin Mary

The Virgin Mary that presides over all who enter the newly dedicated Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles stands eight feet tall and weighs 1,000 pounds. With braided hair, simple clothing and bare head and arms, this Virgin Mary varies from the traditional, as did the methods used to create the statue.

The Virgin Mary is the work of sculptor Robert Graham, who also created the Cathedral doors, which are 20 feet tall and weigh a combined 25 tons. Graham’s L-shaped outer doors frame cast-bronze inner doors depicting various manifestations of the Virgin Mary. Topping the doors is a tympanum, a gilded architectural detail on which the statue stands.

Graham is noted for his large-scale work, including the Olympic Gateway for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and statues of American icons Joe Louis, Duke Ellington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the Virgin Mary, he started with a 30-inch sculpture made from plastilene, an oil- and wax-based clay that holds detail but does not harden. He then created a mold and polyurethane cast that was used to design the Virgin’s clothing. Once this version was approved by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, it was taken to Scansite in Woodacre, Calif, to be scanned and digitized.

Before the scanning, the polyurethane cast was painted gray to ensure a flat, even scan. The figure was scanned using a Cyberware MM laser scanner for the head and a Cyberware MS3030 for the remaining body parts. Once the point-cloud data were collected from multiple scans of the entire piece, we cut the figure into pieces for detailed scans of the head, body, arms, hands and feet, says Noriko Fujinami, director of Robert Graham Studios. Scansite merged data of varying resolutions from each of the scans to create a highly detailed point-cloud model of the entire figure. The final file contained more than 1.7 million points.

The point-cloud data were organized and input into Geomagic Studio software from Geomagic. Geomagic Studio is used for 3D photography, the process of capturing a physical object and automatically turning it into a digital model for design, engineering, mass customization and web-based marketing applications.

Scansite created a polygonal file of the statue in Geomagic Studio. Engineers at Ctek, a service bureau in Tustin, Calif, also used Geomagic Studio to enlarge the figure from its original 30-inch size to its final 8-foot height. 

• Geomagic
• Amazon
• Wikipedia

Reageren?

Geef een reactie