Giovanni GUCCINI / Federico PIRAS / Filippo SUSCA
(Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’architettura, Florence, Italy)
Outline: Digital survey, high performance reconstruction, high performance dataset managment, high quality rendering, high performance sharing.
In the northern part of the Sardinia Island, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. There is an ancient witness of the pre-historic age, a huge volcanic stone carved by the elements and the work of men to produce an elephant-like shape. In the November 2006 we took the laserscan survey of this monument working with the survey laboratory of the “Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’Architettura”. In the 2007 we brought here, to the workshop 12, the first results from that work. Now we propose the new step in the data treatment of that survey as an innovative and robust approach for all this kind of “natural” memories.
Methodology/Approach: Starting from the laserscan survey, a first digital model was made in 2007, it was a very detailed result, but it was too “heavy” for many applications, and not really usable for multimedia, rendering representation and dissemination. An innovative approach based on advanced modelling procedure was made to create a dynamic, versatile, version of the model, allowing to balance the quality of the resulting surface from the whole set of gathered details to a very simple version, with the possibility to change it according to the real needs.
Results: The creation of a versatile, dynamic digital model, brings the main benefit to allow a wide series of operation to take place, from rendering to 3D printing this kind of model shows its capability to fulfil complex needs. At the same time the evolved solution for texturing and detail enhancement allows a very high level of perceptible level of realism. This works perfectly with physical lighting as well to produce interactive models. At the same time The quality of the 3D printing can be chosen according to the printing scale and the printing technology.
Innovations: The use of unconventional modelling and texturing procedures (mainly coming from the game and character design) for this kind of dataset showed a strong and perfect appeal with this “natural” item, the quality of the procedures and the wide testing applied to this specific case study allowed to define a simple set of procedure usable in any situation similar to this one, introducing a complete method for a genre of items very hard to face until now in the survey and representation procedures.
Keywords: Elephant stone, Sardinia, Digital Survey, Digital reconstruction