For my assignment, I chose to map Musser Hall. I lived on 3rd Musser my freshman year, and the building holds many fond memories for me. When I went to search the Archives for pictures of Musser, I came up largely empty handed. None of the photos provided good vantage points from which to map Musser to the photo, and few were in focus. I don’t mean to be a conspiracy theorist, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if Carleton skimped on the Musser photo-documentation. The building isn’t known for it’s beauty on either the inside or out. That being the case, I Googled the building and found one great shot from the southeast corner of the building. Because of Musser’s surroundings, the other three corners of the building are either difficult to photograph or obscured. For that reason, I chose to use the same photo for two opposite corners of the building, the SE and the NW corners. It turned out alright. Because of the good quality of the photo that I was working with, both faces of the building came out pretty clearly.
All in all, I don’t love this method. While I understand how it could greatly improve the realism of a model (especially with purposefully taken photographs), it somehow feels lazy to simply plop a picture over a rudimentary approximation of the building that I’m trying to model. Just my thoughts.
