Here’s what we’ve learned from a marathon day at the Met with a full team of artists and museum staff. We want to share as much wisdom with readers as possible, and ask you to please chime in in the comments. Remember, this is a community! If you have experience with any of these technologies, we need to know!

The surest steps to success using 123D Catch to capture and remake art:

– Provide enough information with your pictures. Basically, make sure each point in your object is appearing in at least three shots, and make sure there is uniform light around the thing you’re trying to Catch. When you don’t have enough info, you’re likely to get a solid block of mass in your model or a total lack of mass where there should be some stuff. Check out the big hole underneath this ritual seat from the Oceanic Art collection.

– If possible, use objects in the background of what you are trying to capture to help the software parse depth. 123D Catch does not like a blank wall with flat paint.

– There is no right way to do this stuff. This is the frontier and we’re figuring this out together. Everyone in this group today was tossing out different ideas and each artist or team of artists was taking a different path toward the goal.

Overheard

“This is all experimental. There is no ‘way.’” — Bre Pettis (@bre)

“By taking a whole series of close up pictures just at one level, I got really good 3D detail. Really good reproduction of very, very small depth.” — Michael Curry (skimbal)

“I’m using an iPhone to do this.” — Adam (@adamfont)

One of the things that we’re doing with all the digitized things from the Met that are being uploaded to Thingiverse is including the accession number. What is this numbering system?

Don Undeen explained to me that the two digit numbers are how they started the documentation of things in the 1800′s and they had a Y2K problem after a hundred years. He also told me that there are a few duplicate accession numbers because the authority for doling them out wasn’t centralized back in the day. Bonus points for finding them in the museum! I’m guessing that every library scientist has a foible about their numbering system. I should also mention that they are called accession numbers because they document the time that they are accessible!

The Met’s site explains.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art assigns a unique accession number to each object it acquires. The first two or four digits of an accession number refer to the year that the object became part of the Metropolitan’s collection. The Museum was founded in 1870 and for the first 100 years of its existence two digits were used. Thus, the first item accessioned into the Museum has the number 70.1 because it was accessioned in 1870.

The accession number for Edgar Degas’s A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?) is 29.100.128. The number 29 refers to the year 1929. The number 100 refers to the collection within which the painting entered the Museum. In this case, it is the Havemeyer Collection, comprised of almost 2,000 items, which came to the Museum in 1929. This particular object is number 128 in that collection.

The accession number for the Roman statue Old Market Woman is 09.39. The 09 refers to 1909, the year in which the statue entered the Museum’s collection. Because it does not have a collection number, we know that this item came to the Museum as an individual object.

In 1970, a century after the Museum’s founding, the style of accession numbers changed. It became necessary to differentiate the accessions of the Museum’s second century from those of the first. For example, the accession number for Vincent van Gogh’s Shoes is 1992.374. This painting was acquired by the Museum in 1992.

So basically they came up with their own version of the Dewey decimal system that worked for the museum. Very cool. I love hearing about the different ways that things are organized.

The transfer of physical objects into the Thingiverse has begun. You know when Flynn gets digitized into the game grid. Yeah, like that, but in the Met! Get ready to start DERIVING/HACKING/MAKING!

The works of art that the team of artists from the Met MakerBot Hackathon are starting to be processed in 123D Catch and uploaded to Thingiverse. The first one is right here! A whole new chapter of universal access to art!

This means that the design files for the 3D models of these pieces, as well as the pieces that this team of artists are creating, will be available to everyone around the world to download for free. Whether or not you have a MakerBot (we hope you do), you can get up close and personal with this art in a whole new way.

Here’s what you need to know:

Thingiverse is designed so that one person can upload a design file and another person can download it. If you make a version of someone else’s Thing, here’s the one thing you should do.

PRESS THIS BUTTON.

That’s it! That’s the only step. Pressing that button shows the world that you are contributing by testing other people’s designs, and giving your thumbs up to the quality.

If you forget to do this and you upload your Thing on its own, don’t worry. You can actually go back through and name a “parent” for your Thing. Simply click “Edit” at the top of your Thing page, scroll to the bottom, and enter the Thingiverse ID number of the parent Thing.

This is important stuff on Thingiverse. Since everyone in the world is putting in the work to make new Things for everyone else to enjoy, it’s important to attribute stuff to its origins. This is how we build off each other’s work and ensure that everyone is a rock star.

Why are you still reading this?! There’s art from the Met on Thingiverse. Go!

We’ll keep adding pictures to this Flickr set throughout the day.

This is how insanely cool the Met is: several of the curators for the different departments we are 123D-Catching things in today are taking time to show us around and answer questions about the art and the entire concept of the Hackathon.

I thought one comment in particular from Associate Curator for Oceanic Art Eric Kjellgren was worth throwing up here on the blog for people to consider.

After several questions about the art, patiently answered by Mr. Kjellgren, the creative mind behind Project Shellter Miles Lightwood (aka TeamTeamUSA) asked how this expert felt about the Met MakerBot Hackathon. He said he was very interested to see what would come out of it, and said his only caution would be this: most of the pieces in the Oceanic Arts collection were religious in nature, and that the art we make from them should keep that in mind.

That’s definitely something to remember when using technologies like 123D Catch and MakerBot to make art based on art. For example, when you start capturing things in your town for the Capture Your Town challenge, keep it real.

Here’s Mr. Kjellgren’s bio:

Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art, Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  His specialized research interests include the art, culture, religion, and oral traditions of Oceania. Prior to joining the Metropolitan Museum, he was Assistant to the Associate Curator of North American Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (1985-86), and Research Assistant at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu (1990-93).

Picture courtesy of Simon Fieldhouse

Tomorrow, the MakerBot Community and the Metropolitan Museum of Art join forces to realize a common dream, one likely to revolutionize how we all think about art and museums.

For the team from the Met Museum — America’s most iconic museum, a world-beloved, forward-thinking art institution — the dream is to collaborate with cutting-edge artists and DIY-makers, to discover how one might bring the relevant, emerging art practice of 3D capture and 3D printing to bear on the task of enlarging the public conversation about works in their permanent collection. For the MakerBot Community — many of us devoted lovers of the Met, brimming with stories for how the institution and its collection have impacted our lives — this is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clip on our Met Museum entry pins, roll up our sleeves, and do what we do best for the betterment of lovers of the Met world-over.

June 1-2, for the first time in history, a collection of brilliant digital artists from the MakerBot Community will be graciously welcomed by the Met in New York City to study, capture, and recreate pieces from the Met’s vast collection of art and artifacts. These artists – stay tuned and we’ll tell you who! – will capture significant works into the digital domain using Autodesk’s 123D Catch, clean up and manipulate the resulting models, and then produce replicas and original pieces of art on our 3rd generation 3D printer, The Replicator.

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