I've been a huge fan of the Hummel since I saw it for the first when I was a very young kid in the 90's in one of the Tamiya Model Magazine. It was wearing a winter camo. I was blown away.
Since then, I have yet to build one Hummel... More than a decade ago I aquired a Bandai one, not to build it but to use some parts on some Star Wars models I was working on. To be short, the modelmakers who built the filming miniatures for the original movies used hundred of kitparts from Bandai, Tamiya, Revell and so on kits to details quickly them.
I ended up buying about 800 kits (including that Bandai Hummel
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
Well, you would think I'm telling you this story because of that Bandai Hummel, actually no, it's not accurate enough and it's going to be discarded for this project. But to recreate those Star Wars filming miniatures as accurately as possible I started to use photogrammetry (I let you do some google search if you don't know what it is), I went to the exhibits displaying the original miniatures, was taking hundred of pictures then recreate them accurately (with all the flaw of the original) in 3D.
And this is the point. Photogrammetry. This is how I'm going to recreate as accurately as possible the Hummel.
I've been to the Saumur museeum some weeks ago and took several pictures of the displayed Hummel.
Then I processed those pictures in my photogrammetry software, after several hours of manual and computer work I was able to get a good solve of the model that was going to be my starting point to recreate it in my 3D software, using the photogrammetry solve as reference. Of course, since I did not have full access to the original Hummel (interior, back, right side, top), I was not able to get a solve of the whole tank.
However it was a nice starting point, giving me solid reference for the overall shapes, angles of the armored panels, their size relation to the chassis and road wheel etc...
I'm going to use a modified Heng Long Panzer IV chassis (I am waiting 2 HL Panzer IV chassis because I'm building a Panzer IV Beob, which will be a nice companion to the Hummel, using the Trumpeter Beob ausf J upper hull, they seem to take forever to find their way from China haha). I will use several parts that are common to the Panzer IV from the Trumpeter kit (going to mold and cast resin copies of those parts), everything else will be scratchbuilt with styrene, brass, aluminium etc. I will also 3D print some parts with my resin printers.
Here are the mesh of the solve I did in the photogrammetry software. You see it imported into Rhino software in order to use it as reference to build a clean 3D model which will help to create plans I will print to cut the styrene parts. My 3D model You can see here the solve overlayed with the 3D model I made Some various pictures of the 3D model, this is still a WIP but if you see big mistakes, let me know !