A Production Pipeline

Computer graphics productions for Cultural Heritage purposes suffer usually from limited budgets. The optimisation of the prodution pipeline is therefore mandatory for squizing the most from tiny economic resources. Cineca has successfully adopted a production pipeline centered on Blender since its first educational short movie, “Apa the Etruscan”, further improved with its spin-off “Ati”, about the Southern Etruscan region and the Temple of Veii. The availability of Cookie Flex Rig characters cut significantly down the time of production, enabling to concentrate only on adaptating them to the philological needs of museum curators. Improved production pipeline and ready-made characters have been mixed with less modelling and more laser data acquisitions, helped in this choice by new released open-source 1.3.2 Meshlab tool and its better integration within Blender. This improved pipeline facilitate cross-media productions that, in our current experience, range from a new educational game to 3D printing.

Presentation Outline

Peculiarity of the Cultural Heritage context

• purpose
• audience
• recontruction correctness
• many supervisors involved
• low budget production

Overall Scheme

Generating Terrains from GIS data

• Gis data is processed in ArcView and exported in DEM format.
• the Dem is converted into a Textured Tiled Terrain with the desired resolution in osgDem
• Terrain Tiles are converted to OBJ with osgConv
• We scripted the import in Blender to sistematically handle Scaling/Positioning

a sample of an elaborated terrain

Generating Cities by Procedural Modeling

• Models created in CityEngine and exchanged in OBJ format
• City Models splitted by material for Blender 2.49, splitted by building for Blender 2.5+
• Ability to script both export from CityEngine and import in Blender

reconstruction of the city of Bologna in present time

Acquiring Models with Laser Scan techniques

• Scan Data import, elaboration and decimation in Meshlab
• Import in Blender as OBJ file
• Bake of details in a displacement/normal map and replace geometries

Setting up a RenderFarm

• Building Blender on a Supercomputer
• Running jobs with pbs
• SVN repository as RenderFarm input and webdavs repository as output
• RenderFarm web front-end in DJango
• Autobalancing load among frames
• Rendering mode: normal, completion, preview
• Rendering channels: mono, stereo, left, right
• Versioning the Frames
• Encoding the Frames

render task scheme

Stereography

• Get stereography direction during preproduction
• Animate the camera as usual
• Add Left and Right camera and tune stereography parameters in later production
• Use the stereography support in the RenderFarm
• Check movie shots
• Final edit and stereography render

Sample anaglyph

Planning the work

• Understand task dependencies
• Exploit parallelism among sub-teams
• Engage partners
• Rough task scheduling

Tools for Collaboration

• Color Coded Asset Lifecycle
• Use every asset in mutual exclusion
• Distribute tasks, track who is doing what, communication among Artists and Supervisors
• Track overall progress
• Initially based on GoogleDocs
• We are looking for a more specific tool

Production Workflow

• Three different online repositories
• Artist daily loop
• Technical supervisor / Renderwrangler daily loop
• Directors/Supervisors loop

Our Previous Experience:

the APA short movie

Apa: the main character

Apa is projected everyday in its dedicated theater at the Museum of the History of Bologna - Genus Bononiae

Incoming improvements for ATI, Cineca new short movie

Character creation

• cgCookie Flex Rig provides a fully rigged, customizable character that fits perfectly our needs
• Easy overall customization provided
• Fine detail customization by shape-keys
• Model adaptation following the iconography and references given by the archaeologists

Evolution of ATI, the etruscan main character of our new short movie

Steps towards tool integration

• Hpc-Forge is our project hosting facility
• Allows the creation of projects and enables to work on several projects in parallel
• Manages user authentication and permissions
• Connects projects to various resources and services
• Coming-soon: Git and OpenClouds

Improved Workflow for Laser Scan Data

• Laser scanner acquisitions
• Processing the acquired data
• Texture mapping and semplification in MeshLab
• Baking of Normal maps with Blender
• Color texture creation and virtual restoration in The GIMP
• Fine detailing with Blender stencil and texture painting

Virtual restoration (left) and laser acquisition of the original frieze (right)

RenderFarm enhancements

• Serve different projects in parallel
• Cycles support
• Inspect production files dependencies
• Listen for SVN commit and propose Job to run
• To be opened to external customers
• The Web Front-End will be released as open source

Digital Libraries and Asset Metadata

• Digital Library as a way to archive and share assets
• Promote reuse (at present on OpenData - Bologna municipality)
• Metadata to document assets and improve searching
• Future new WebApp to support Metadata creation/editing during production
• Metadata embedding

Cross-Media

Apa Game

Roman environment - bounding box setting (work in progress)

3D Printing

3D printing first experiments: the Sarcophagus of the Spouses and Ati