Monument Photogrammetry

Suppose you want to draw someone's face but all you have are photo references. You might use a front view for eye spacing, a side view for the length of the nose, etc. Ideally you would want to get pictures from every possible angle so that you could get all the details and measurements you need. Practically, you are not going to get that. However, with enough views you could probably make a reasonable representation.

This is the idea behind photogrammetry, the science of making measurements from images; you take viewpoints, typically from different angles, and put them together to reconstruct their contents. There is free software out there (e.g. VisualSFM, 3DF Zephyr) which can take a series of photos and stitch them together into 3d models.

I use the approach to make models of monuments and sculptures. The figure shown above is an example with a terracotta warrior.