Star Wars Identities - Edmonton

On March 2nd, 2013, my girlfriend and I got out to see the Star Wars Identities Exhibit at the Telus World of Science in Edmonton. The exhibit contains quite a remarkable number of props, costumes, models, and art from the making of the movies. It will, apparently, be stopping in only twelve cities over the course of a six-year world tour. It was in Montreal first and, at the time of writing this, wraps up in Edmonton - the second stop on the tour - in a few weeks.

Using very slick technology and multimedia displays, the exhibit endeavours to have people answer the question: "What forces shape you?" To that end, on entry everyone is given a bracelet that tracks the selections you make at 10 different stations throughout the exhibit. The end result is a character profile based on your choices. My girlfriend and I got as far as choosing a race (Mon Calamari and Wookiee, FYI) at the first station before losing interest in that aspect of the exhibit and turning to wondering around checking out all the neat stuff!

Photography is encouraged, but was challenging given the low light conditions, glass in front of most of the objects, and the big crowds of people (at full capacity they were letting 300 people through an hour!) The following images are my favourites from the day. Seeing the models of the ships was the coolest part (though probably the hardest to photograph).

3D Gargoyle

123D is free 3D modelling software from Autodesk. 123D Catch (formerly Photofly) can be used to generate 3D meshes from photos! Amazing, I know. I had to try. The software for actually converting images to a 3D mesh resides on the Autodesk servers. You upload a batch of photos and it spits back the result. I took 44 images of my Gargoyle to upload. Thinking of minimizing the upload time, I converted them to grayscale and resized the images to only 800px in the long dimension. The largest image is was only 100 KB. Even with these images, the software returned a very impressive result.




The software offers the ability to quickly output videos of your meshes. This is my Gargoyle on Vimeo:


Photofly Gargoyle from Dave C Griffith on Vimeo.