STYLE CHARACTERISTICS OF SCULPTURES DESCRIBED WITH THE DISTRIBUTION OF FACET NORMAL VECTORS OF A POLYGON MESH

A Form Comparison of Historical Wood Carvings by Takeshi Ihachi and Goto Yoshimitsu

抄録

This paper proposed a quantitative approach to comparing differences in the style characteristics of historical wood sculptures created by Ihachi and Yoshimitsu, two famous Edo-period carvers in the Kanto region of Japan. We remeshed 3D-scanning models of the sculptures to low-polygon models with the same number of polygons in order to quantitatively compare the models in a topological analysis, and defined the facet normals for each polygon mesh. We then plotted the facet normals of the low-polygon models to a unit sphere and plotted the density of the endpoints of the facet normals on the unit sphere in the spectrum. Several small areas with a very high density of endpoints could be observed on the Ihachi sphere, whereas, for Yoshimitsu, endpoint density appeared to be lower and less concentrated. Thus, it was determined that the surfaces of Ihachi's sculptures tend to orient to several specific directions, while the surfaces of Yoshimitsu's sculptures orient to various directions equally.