The orthophotos generated from the 3D model can be very detailed indeed, but they can reveal flaws if things move during scanning. With humans, this causes a bit of a problem. Here’s an example of the E49 and model Rob:-
This print is A1 in size and Rob appears alongside the submarine, adding great scale to the scene. Here’s a closer view:-
Now its worth saying here that Rob moved during the scan. Not much, perhaps just a few millimetres, but it was enough. The scan of the submarine is fine – that is not moving anytime soon – but humans breathe in and out…twitch…fidget about…they move. Here’s a view taken from the original orthophoto. The original is 1.87Gb in size, is georeferenced (can be used in Google Earth) and is a 1:1 full size 2D view of the wreck. Given a big enough printer, this can be printed life-size.
In this image, Rob is life-size so we had to scale him down a bit to fit all of the E49 onto a piece of A1 paper. Anyhow, here’s a crop taken from the full size image:-
Its a bit wonky! Rob did a sterling job remaining still but there was a little bit of Photoshop work to tidy it up. The Rob in the final print is actually a composite taken from another orthophoto of Rob developed from slightly differing data. Rest assured, the submarine itself remains unedited…
Now if we zoom in even more, we can see who does Rob’s cylinder servicing:-
For truly static things like wrecks, orthophotos work really well. For moving subjects we get a result that is representative of what is on the seabed. It needs a little work with Photoshop, and that’s acceptable when we get such a great way of visualising scale.