Program item

Archiving 2025

Capturing Specularity with Kintsugi 3D and Camera-mounted Flash

SC14

Capturing Specularity with Kintsugi 3D and Camera-mounted Flash
Instructor(s): Charles Walbridge, Minneapolis Institute of Art
Level: Introductory
Duration: 2 hours
Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with photogrammetry. Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop to maximize the hands-on learning experience.
Course Time: 16:30-18:30

Benefits
This course enables the attendee to:
- Use Kintsugi 3D Builder to build empirically based textures and materials from photographs taken with camera-mounted flash.
- Calibrate textures to represent physical light reflectance from a ColorChecker reference image.
- Calibrate a digital model of a camera-mounted flash to mask out shadows.
- Publish models processed with Kintsugi 3D Builder to platforms like Sketchfab.
- Understand the benefits of viewing models in Kintsugi 3D Viewer.

Course Description
In 2023, the University of Wisconsin - Stout, Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), and Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI) received an NEH Preservation and Access R&D grant to research a camera-mounted flash photogrammetry workflow for metallicity/specularity capture, enabling publicly accessible 3D rendering with improved material reproduction accuracy. The result is a new open-source software platform called Kintsugi 3D. In this course, participants learn how to use Kintsugi 3D Builder to derive specularity from source photographs, which prevents highlights from being baked into the diffuse map and avoids “faking” specularity with specular maps created by hand. Participants also learn about Kintsugi 3D Viewer, which offers better appearance accuracy than the “PBR” model used by Sketchfab and similar platforms.

Intended Audience: Photographers using or interested in 3D photogrammetry, looking for ways to better capture material appearance and specularity.

Charles Walbridge is Lead Collections Photographer at Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia). With more than 20 years experience documenting varied collections of fine art objects under exacting standards, Charles has been at the leading edge of digital capture, color management and studio workflow processes for cultural heritage. Since 2013, he has played a key role in developing 3D modeling techniques for Mia's Visual Resources studio, forming cross-discipline collaborations with developers, animators, and maker spaces.