The official name of Seokguram, National Treasure No. 24, is Seokguram Seokgul. Designated as World Cultural Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1995, it is an artificial stone temple made of granite. Seokguram is an artificial stone temple made of granite, and is located on the eastern peak of Mt. Toham. Inside the roundshaped main hall, there are the Bonjon Statue, Bodhi-sattva and his disciples. Seokguram was built to preserve these statues. The Bonjon figure wearing a generous smile is seated on the stage engraved with lotus flower design. The rounded ceiling looks like a half-moon or a bow and has a lotus flower decorated cover on it. As the sunrise from this spot is so beautiful, many people climb the mountain at daybreak.
When the National Museum of Korea asked a team of researchers to digitally reconstruct a national treasure for public enjoyment, they employed 3D scanning and Rapidform software to create a complete 3D virtual replica. Seokguram Grotto is a 1200 year old cave shrine in Gyeongju, South Korea, sitting 750 meters above sea level and overlooking the East Sea (Sea of Japan). It was designated a national treasure of Korea in 1962, and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995. It embodies some of the finest Buddhist sculptures in the world. Despite the shrine’s tremendous cultural significance, the Korean public is restricted from close access – as are the large number of tourists who visit the region every year.
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| Seokguram Grotto |
So the National Museum of Korea and a team of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) resolved to give people a way to easily experience and interact with the shrine despite its seclusion. They came up with a great solution: to display a complete, full-scale, 3D digital replica of Seokguram Grotto in the National Museum. Such a replica would also allow them to preserve the present condition of the shrine if they ever needed to restore it from damage in the future.
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| Seokguram Grotto |
But how do you create an exact digital replica of an entire shrine with all its intricate details? This team did it with another great solution – pairing the Konica Minolta Vivid 9i, a state-of-the-art 3D scanner, with one of Rapidform’s powerful software solutions, Rapidform XOS. To make matters even more challenging, they would need to have everything together in one master file for analysis, so they needed to work with a huge amount of data simultaneously. Finally, they planned to construct physical models of the human remains found in the tomb, so they needed a solution that was flexible enough for them to split up the data and optimize it for reproduction in resin.
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