Own project Photogrammetry 2022 — ongoing
A digital archive of what the war did to ordinary places, captured in 3D while the buildings were still standing.
Photographs flatten a room. A scan keeps it: the scale, the geometry, the burn marks on a wall you can walk up to. When a building is demolished or rebuilt, the scan is the only version left that anyone can still enter.
So we went to the places that were about to disappear — schools, kindergartens, houses, the cars left in the yards — and turned them into models anyone can open in a browser. Everything is public. Researchers, museums and teachers use them without asking us for permission.
History is a look at the past, but at the same time the future.Martin Pollack
49
objects of war damage published
13
of them from the Yahidne school, where civilians were held in the basement
65 800
views on the war models to date
01
Hundreds of overlapping frames from a drone and a camera. One room takes a day, and the light does not wait.
02
Photogrammetry in Reality Capture turns the frames into a point cloud, then into a mesh with real measurements.
03
Cleanup and retopology in Blender. A scan that nobody can load is a scan that nobody sees.
04
Published to Sketchfab so it opens in any browser, and prepared for Unreal Engine 5 for walkable versions.
Every site is different, so the plan is the same every time and the timing never is.
1—3 days
Finding the site, studying it, getting permission to fly and to enter, planning the shoot, packing the gear.
1 day
The object is photographed from every angle with a drone and ground equipment, in one continuous pass while the light holds.
1—2 days
The frames become a 3D model by photogrammetry — the machine runs unattended, and it either aligns or the trip was wasted.
1 day
Millions of triangles down to something a phone can open, without losing the detail that carries the evidence.
Same day
Uploaded with its location and date, public, free to reuse.
The project is open
Travel, fuel, permissions and gear come out of pocket. Support goes to the next trip and to replacing what breaks.
Datasets are piling up faster than they can be reconstructed. Reality Capture and Blender people are the bottleneck.
Everything is public. Take them for research, teaching, exhibitions or memorials — no permission needed, a credit is enough.