Visualizing H. L. Hunley

Digital, facial-approximation workflow-progression sequence.

Visualizing H. L. Hunley: Understanding the Past through New Facial Approximations of the Crew of a Civil War Submarine

The archaeological team at the WLCC has undertaken a project to develop new 3D facial approximations of the crew of the H.L. Hunley submarine. In collaboration with Clemson’s Digital Production Arts program (DPA), this project attempts to better understand the crew of H.L. Hunley by developing new and innovative techniques to reconstruct facial features from their skeletal remains. Using 3D scan data of the remains, digital likenesses will be built that work within the flexible Epic Games Metahuman framework to create interactive, photorealistic likenesses that can make realistic expressions, perform match speech and be animated for any digital applications. In addition to providing a better approximation of the crew's facial features, the results of this project may be used to attempt to find unidentified photographic records and potential background histories for the crewmen of H.L. Hunley.