If you visit Humboldt on Google Earth these days, a few things are going to stick out.
The Humboldt and District Museum and Gallery (HDMG) is one of them.
A three-dimensional model of the museum building - Humboldt's historic post office - for Google Earth was created by one of the HDMG's summer students, Ben Whittaker.
Now, when visitors go to street level on the Google program, they see the museum as it stands on the corner of Main St. and 6th Ave. in Humboldt - one of just two city landmarks to do so.
The idea to have a summer student focus on creating a model of this kind of their building came about after HDMG director Jennifer Hoesgen attended a geomodelling class at a Saskatchewan Museums Association Conference.
Geomodelling is the process of creating 3-D models of buildings and geographic features, typically for use in programs like Google Earth.
"I thought it would be cool to do (a model of the museum)," Hoesgen said.
Whittaker, who is working on his degree in new media at the University of Lethbridge, was absolutely ready to devote some of his summer hours to doing it.
His university program has a very broad scope, he explained, which extends from 3-D modelling to character animation to web and print design.
"Anything that's computery-arty stuff," he grinned.
So creating a 3-D model of the building was right up his alley. Add to that the fact that it allowed the museum to take advantage of his special skills and promote the museum on a global scale, and it was a win-win situation all the way around.
So how, exactly, do you create a 3-D model of a building?
To simplify a somewhat complicated process, Whittaker took photos of every part of the building - front, back, corners, sides, roof.
Then he fed the photos into Sketch-Up software, available on Google.
Using the photos as a guide, he built the model of the museum in chunks, then he added and removed details as necessary, and textured the building, as well.
Eventually, he ended up with a model that exactly resembles the museum and which pops up out of the ground on Google Earth.
It even has flag poles outside.
"The museum was a little tricky to model," Whittaker admitted. "But with the help of numerous photos, I was able to get it done. I didn't realize before how many different parts and bits there are to the museum."
For example, he said, there are three small dormer windows on the south side, but only two on the north.
"And the tops of the vents on the clock tower actually angle down a bit. Who knew?" he said.
A major challenge in the modelling was with Google Earth itself, Whittaker noted.
"The satellite imagery for Humboldt is pretty terrible, considering we're such a small place," he said. "So not only are the images themselves a blurry mess, they're also out of alignment with the actual road data in Google Maps and Google Earth. The museum model is correctly placed when compared to the roads, I think," he said.
Doing the modelling not only allowed Whittaker experience in the exercise, it also provided him with a mentor in Gregg Babish.
Babish, who spoke at the conference Hoesgen attended, is among a growing group of 3-D modellers who are profiling Saskatchewan's built heritage on Google Earth. It was Babish who created the 3-D model of another Humboldt landmark - the historic Water Tower.
But Whittaker is hoping to add more 3-D models to Humboldt over the next while, for practice, he said.
"I'll probably start with the Merchants Bank building," he said, referring to the building directly across Main St. from the museum. "It's pretty simple - two boxes stuck together, with three, maybe five different photos for textures," he said.
He'll be busy with 3-D models at school this fall, as well, as he was recently awarded an internship to model the University of Lethbridge campus.
Whittaker recently finished up his third summer working at the HDMG.
The 3-D model of the HDMG building is currently visible on Google Earth.
