3-D digitizing technologies have been utilized in the industrial world for the last 20 years but are increasingly used in many other fields. One of the exciting, but unanticipated, uses of 3-D measurement tools has been their adoption by museums for sculpture conservation, research, and interactive exhibits.

3-D scanning is a perfect fit for documenting museum pieces. Museums, for example, typically have pieces that cannot or should not be touched, yet present tremendous opportunity for study, documentation, interactive presentation, or scaled for one-to-one reproduction. The great news is that with one scan, all of the above can be achieved without any physical contact with the work of art.

Direct Dimensions Inc. (DDI) first became involved with scanning sculptures for research purposes in 2004 when they were approached by the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) to scan two castings of Antoine Louis Barye’s “Tigre qui Marche” (The Walking Tiger). The BMA was interested in dimensionally inspecting and comparing two of the (many) existing castings. Direct Dimensions laser scanned the two tigers with a Faro Scan Arm and overlaid the two resulting 3-D models to compare them.

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