Restoration of a Stemmed Fruit Bowl Using 3d Technologies

Kaja Antlej ; Kristjan Celec ; Menaf Sinani ; Erazem Mirtič ; Darja Ljubič ; Janja Slabe ; Gorazd Lemajič ; Mateja Kos

Review of the National Center for Digitization, Tome 21 (2012) no. 1

Résumé

3D digitization is not used only for documentation, researching and presenting of three-dimensional objects in virtual environment but, with help of a computer reconstruction and 3D printing, also for restoration of museum objects. In this paper a restoration of several damaged stemmed fruit bowl (two pieces with different damages) is described. The object is from the National Museum of Slovenia and its ceramics collection. The bowl is highly perforated throughout its surface; therefore making new fragments with conventional procedure would be a long standing and complicated restoration process. Consequently we try to improve already mentioned restoration process using 3D technologies. First, both pieces of the bowl were 3D digitized with a portable 3D scanner. On the basis of digitized data a 3D reconstruction of missing fragments was made. Afterwards the fragments were 3D printed in material similar to plaster, inserted directly into both pieces of fruit bowl and finally infiltrated during conservation-restoration process. A presented case shows that 3D technologies can improve standard conservation-restoration process and can make it faster, less complicated and more accurate. Process also gives a collateral product in a form of 3D digital model – of an original object and reconstructed one – that can be presented virtually.