When you think of sports championships, there is always the goal of winning the big trophy – Grey Cup, Stanley Cup, Rose Bowl, World Cup, and so on. When the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships (NAHC) needed a trophy, they turned to artist Carey Newman to carve one. He created the Turtle Island Trophy. While the trophy is a beautiful artwork in and of itself, it is not the most durable object to hoist overhead on the ice, so the artist and the NAHC approached us to 3D scan the trophy and provide a file to use to create a copy.
All the arrangements were made and last October, the trophy was delivered to the Libraries in its own custom made traveling case. Leanne was given lead on the scanning while I helped troubleshoot as needed and stepped in at the end of the process to help train Leanne on the software we use to edit the final file. It was Leanne’s first big job on the 3D scanner and often she wasn’t sure if she was using the tools incorrectly or if the tools were failing. In almost every case, the tools were letting us down.
The Turtle Island Trophy pushed our hardware and software beyond its limits; we had to ask our tech department to upgrade the RAM in the dedicated workstation not once but twice during the process because the files became so large that they repeatedly froze and crashed the system. We also had to adapt to an upgrade of the proprietary software that introduced a significant change to the workflow.
Our first inspection of the Turtle Island Trophy identified the potentially tricky parts to capture – copper accents and plates (denoting each championship team and year), the darker stained wood, and the shape of the wings. As scanning began we confirmed that the wings and the base (which included the darker wood and the copper plates) were going to be the most difficult to accurately capture.
One of the biggest challenges we had was determining whether or not to use targets or not – not using targets is our default. As scanning progressed, it became clear that there was not quite enough detail to allow for the cameras track and capture the surface accurately. We put a call into Creaform, the company that makes the 3D scanner hardware and proprietary software to determine what was the best way forward and after testing a discrete part of the carving we determined the adhesive was safe for the surface and proceeded with targets in place for the remaining scans. The company also walked us through the solution to removing targets from the scans – a solution that unfortunately meant early work had to be abandoned and new scans created. This was a huge disappointment as Leanne had close to a complete scan, but the new scans came along quickly and she soon reached the same point of the first set.
At this stage, our unit was physically relocated within the library and resulted in several weeks of downtime for the 3D workstation and the project was put on hold. When Leanne was able to return to scanning, she was down to just a few trouble spots. Getting into the vee between the wings and the body of the carving proved the most challenging part to scan – there simply isn’t enough space to change the angle of the handset so even after many attempts we were left with gaps in the 3D model. As we approached the deadline the decision was made to stop scanning and “fix it in post” using the Meshmixer program.
Meanwhile Leanne hit a wall with the merges – the files had become so large that the computer repeatedly crashed. Our tech department knew that there was enough RAM physically in the machine but discovered that Windows 10 had automatically allocated only a small portion of that for file swapping. Once that was corrected, the merges took time but stopped crashing the system.
When Leanne had finished merging all the pieces, we took the completed but not watertight model and exported it to work with in Meshmixer. First, I walked Leanne through the basics of the program, the parts I had learned from our work study student who scanned, edited, and uploaded most of the Cowan specimens. However, we needed the software to do more than the basics. The part of the scan where the wings meet the body still had large gaps that when auto-filled produced a blob. I had to sort out how to fill the wing side of the gap and the body side of the gap separately. I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to draw a series of lines/bridges across each gap and fill the isolated parts until there was only a small gap remaining to autofill.
Surprisingly but happily I was able to find the answer among the help pages for the Meshmixer software rather than in some frustrated-users forum. I did the work to fill that big gap as Leanne watched then she took over to finish smoothing the rough digital edges. Once we had a workable model, we coordinated with the Digital Scholarship Commons to print a scaled down model.
We were very pleased with the results, as were the stakeholders who saw the printed miniature version when they came to collect the trophy itself. The files are now in the hands of the NAHC for reprinting as they see fit! Below are images of the completed print model alongside the original Turtle Island Trophy. We all felt very pleased to hold that tangible artifact of our weeks of hard work. That pleasure extends past our department. Rick Brant, Executive Director of Indigenous Sport, Physical Activity & Recreation Council (ISPARC) told us, “The legacy of this work will be the tremendous sense of pride that players, organizations, and communities across Canada will share as a result of being able to bring home their own replica of the Turtle Island Cup”
