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3D documentation – Jurklošter’s monastery

About the project

3Dpro is a team of professionals who deal with virtual walks, 3D documentation, 360-degree photography, mapping, point-cloud modelling and Google Street View photography.

Through a combination of virtual walks, classic photography, video and drone footage they have developed an interesting new 3D virtual medium.

With a 3D virtual walk, companies, products and locations are presented in an extremely interactive way.

The challenge

Their challenge was to create 3D documentation of old buildings to preserve them for cultural heritage. For this project, the location was Jurklošter, a settlement in eastern Slovenia which contains a large Carthusian monastery. The monastery consists of many different buildings such as a defence tower, an old manor house, an old cemetery, and a parish church. This is the case of the latter, the parish church.

Did you know? Jurklošter Carthusian monastery is one of the most significant in Central Europe. Founded in the 12th century it provided the backdrop for the undying love story between Frederick II, Count of Celje, and Veronica of Desenice.

The approach

It took 4 days of scanning, resulting in 5,000 HD photos and 3 weeks of post production to achieve the results 3Dpro were satisfied with. It was a huge undertaking.

Normally 3Dpro uses the latest available technology and special 3D cameras to scan and record. But while these cameras are great for indoors – they were no match for the gargantuan size of the area and building. As a result, they turned towards also using drones and aerial 3D scanning. They did the research on hardware and purchased the DJI Phantom 4 RTK + D-RTK 2 Mobile Station Combo. The choice was proven to be satisfactory, since the drone is considered ‘The Rolls Royce of DJI’, as the man on the phone put it while they were making payment.

After several re-watching of a handful of YouTube tutorials (and a brief reading of enclosed DJI’s documents), they went out merrily with their equipment and started scanning.

But then they were confronted with the second phase: which software provider to choose?

The software

There are many different players on the market, and similar to when making the drone purchase, they wanted to play it safe. As they said: “Not naming anyone, but we went with the most known one. They must be the best – surely?“

Like many others, people enjoy “learning by doing” and from their experience, the software could not process the large data they threw at it, even when using 50% of the photos – 2,500 – it could simply not handle it.

So, they went software shopping again. By chance they came across 3Dsurvey, not knowing both our companies are registered in Ljubljana, roughly 5 kilometres from each other. (Yes, Slovenia is a small country!)

They took a leap of faith and went with us. “Right off the bat the software had a much more solid feel to it, with much simpler UI, easy to navigate and a clean look.” they said. Thanks, guys!

With no further delay, let’s take a look at the results of our collaboration below.

The results

Here is the total area of great cultural importance – Jurklošter. Click the links to see the 3D documentation.

3D model of total area:

LINK: https://vr.3dpro.si/sl/jurkloster-case-study 

3D model of only the church:

LINK: https://vr.3dpro.si/sl/samostan-jurkloster

*Please note that our clients were handed the .ply files in many times greater resolution. These models serve only for broader public’s visual representations and are greatly limited by the upload server size limits – thus we needed to lower the calculations and textures considerably.

We were amazed how great the textures were. Here are 2 examples of a real close-up:

Using the bounding box feature

The bounding box was very useful in this instance when processing the data. This site is visited by many tourists daily, so there were plenty of cars coming and going. Check out our tutorial here.

They used the tool to remove the cars from the scene without damaging the rest of the area. See below.

About 3Dpro

3Dpro are among the pioneers of indoor scanning in Slovenia. So far, they’ve captured over 300.000 m2 of indoor spaces in our region and transformed them into digital twins. They are in the field of visualizations, ‘storytelling’ and 3D digital twins.

We would like to give a big shout-out to Jano Komac, founder of 3Dpro and Mediapro, who provided us with this amazing case study! According to his words, this is the first project he shared with us, but there are many more coming!

We are looking forward to hearing from you again, Jano!

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