Queens in the Park

Today, I’d like to present a short test object I made using my cellphone camera. Earlier this year I relocated to Hannover, Lower Saxony, so I have to pass these two ladies every day on my way to work. Sadly, I was always too lazy to carry a good camera with me, so I decided to give my Lumia a try.

Normally, this place is very crowded with runners, tourists and other people, but this Friday it was raining so no one was in my way and I took a shot.

3D Models from Cellphone Pictures?

I have to admit I was skeptically at first, using my mobile camera. Earlier tests with my Samsung Galaxy S2 produced models, but because of the noise in the pictures, I had to invest quite a lot of time to cleaning dense point clouds from unwanted point clusters.
In this test, I used a Lumia 640 LTE with an 8 MP camera. The pictures taken by the Lumia app consist of a short series of pictures, so I was worried that these would destroy the geometry of the picture and make it useless. This was not the case. Nevertheless, there is a small amount of noise in the pictures as well as the clouds, but nothing that can’t be fixed in a short time.

The technical restrictions of the cellphone Hardware are still limiting the outcome. So is the geometry relatively unsharp, and parts of the texture are missing. I corrected these details using 3D Coat as a retouch tool.

Princesses of the Eilenriede

The princess group is a sculpture made by Johann Gottfried Schadow between 1795 and 1797, initially in cast. Before the double statue, Schadow produced a number of smaller portrait busts.

The two princesses became later both queens, and were posing for this sculpture in their early years in Berlin. Luise became the later Queen of Prussia and Frederike the queen of Hanover in their third marriage. The sculpture depicts the deep affiliation between the Hohenzollern and Welfen and they were used to justify the Prussian annexion of Hannover in 1866.

Although critics and the public spoke very positive of the Sculptures, in 1797, the husband of Luise was not so glad. So the sculpture was nearly lost for 90 years. After this time, several copies were made, in different materials.

This copy was a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II. to the city of Hannover in 1910, to celebrate the 100. Memorial day of Queen Luise. The copy is made of white marble and 30% larger than the original. It was crafted by Valentino Casal an artist who was famous for replicating many different statues in Berlin.

In 2005, the sculpture was restaurated by the City of Hannover, the Klosterkammer Hannover as well as private donors.