A Production Pipeline

for cultural heritage movies

Silvano Imboden
s.imboden@cineca.it

Motivare la Rilevanza per la BConf

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 character 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 ranges from a new educational game to 3D printing.

Presentation Outline

Overall Scheme

At this level the our pipeline scheme is not different from the scheme of any Indy Production

Peculiarity of the Cultural Heritage context

pourpose
audience
recontruction correctness
many supervisor involved
low budget

Previous Experience:

the APA short movie

12 minutes short movie, 20 location, 100 shot,
[ aggiungere il Museo, i premi,
Fare il diagramma delle persone/team, e poi fare un secondo diagramma con i supervisori storici/archeologici ]

Apa main character:
2D Concept: Stefano Meazza
Voice: Lucio Dalla
Modeling: Spark D.E. #FIX
Texture and shading: Enrico Valenza
Rigging: Bassam Kurdali
Animation: Gianpaolo Fragale

exploiting parallelism among sub-teams

capire le interdipendenze tra il lavoro dei vari sottogruppi permette di sfruttare il parallellismo e painificare correttamente. consigli da spark

Production Workflow

uso di tre diversi repository online
abbiamo imparato molto da BBB e da Spark

Tools for Collaboration

in mancanza di meglio insieme di regole e strumenti gratuiti per gestire la comunicazione e tracciare lo stato di avanzamanto

Generating Terrain from GIS data

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

an example 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