An Introduction to Building 3D Crime Scene Models Using SketchUp, an article which I co-authored with Elissa St. Clair (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) and Albert Schade (Berks County District Attorney’s Office, Forensic Services Unit), was published in the Fall 2012 Journal of the Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction.
The purpose of the article is to try to encourage those doing crime scene reconstruction work to consider SketchUp as a tool due to its ease-of-use, affordability (free!), and the wealth of models available in the 3D Warehouse. With SketchUp, it is possible to get a reasonable 3D model from a 2D crime scene sketch without being a professional modeller or spending months learning the tools.
In the article we give an example from a real crime scene and show step-by-step how we constructed the 3D model from the 2D sketch. At the end we show the resulting 3D model side-by-side with the crime scene photos.
The abstract of the paper is on our Bloodstain Research page, and the article and supplemental material are also available for download.
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