3D documentation – Jurkloster’s monastery

3Dpro company is a team of professionals that deals with virtual walks, 3D digitization, 360-degree photography, mapping, point-cloud modelling and Google Street View photography.

For their demanding clients from them through a combination of a virtual walk, classic photography, video and drone footage they have developed a new medium.

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

Their challenge was to create point clouds of old building to preserve them for cultural heritage. Location was the Jurklošter monastery, which spreads over a larger area. It consists of many different buildings such as a tower, an old manor house, an old cemetery, and the monastery. This is the case of the latter.

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.

In total It took 4 days of scanning, taking 5.000 HD photos and 3 weeks of post production to achieve the results 3dpro is satisfied with. . Safe to say this was a huge project right?

Normally using  latest available technology  and special 3D cameras. But while this cameras are great for indoors – they were no match for the gargantuan size of the area. So, they’ve turned  sight towards drones and aerial 3D scanning. They’ve done the research on hardware and purchased the DJI Phantom 4 RTK + D-RTK 2 Mobile Station Combo. The choice was proven to be correct, since the drone really is ‘… The Rolls Royce of the DJI …’ as the man on the phone put it when they were making payment.

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

But then there is a second phase: which software provider to choose?

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

As a lot of others, people like to do “learning by doing” and from  their experience – not so much, at least not for their needs. The software could not process the large data they threw at it, even when they took only 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, just about 5 kilometres from each other. Yes, Slovenia is a small country!

They took the 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 due let’s take a look at results results of our collaboration below.

Here is the total area of great cultural importance – Jurklošter.

Total area:

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

Example of a more detailed monastery:

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.

And here is the Jurklošter’s monastery.

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

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

The bounding box came very useful as well. The site is visited by many tourists daily so there were cars coming and going.

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

See the 3Dmodel here: https://bit.ly/3nIA51n 

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

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

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. We are in the field of visualizations, ‘storytelling’ and 3D digital twins.