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 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

Peculiarity of the Cultural Heritage context

• pourpose
• audience
• recontruction correctness
• many supervisor involved
• low budget

Overall Scheme

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

Acquire Models with Laser Scan

• Scan Data import, processing and decimation in Meshlab
• Import in blender as OBJ file
• Baking details in a displacement map and replace geometry

Setting up a RenderFarm

• building Blender on a Supercomputer
• running jobs with pbs
• svn repository as RenderFarm input and webdavs repository for output
• RenderFarm web frontend 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

• getting stereography direction during preproduction
• animate the camera as usual
• adding Left and Right camera and tune stereography params in later production
• Stereography support in the RenderFarm
• check movie shot
• final editing and stereography

an example anaglyph

Planning the work

• understand task dependencies
• exploiting parallelism among sub-teams
• engage partners
• rough task scheduling

Tools for Collaboration

• Color Coded Asset Lifecycle
• Using asset in mutual exclusion
• Distribute tasks, track who is doing what, communication among Artist and Supervisors
• Trac overall progress
• Initially based on GoogleDocs
• We need a more specific tool

Production Workflow

• Three different online repository
• Artist daily loop
• Technical supervisor / Renderwrangler daily loop
• Directors/Supervisor loop

Our Previous Experience:

the APA short movie

Apa main character:

Apa is still playing everyday in its dedicated theater in the Genus Bononie Museum

Incoming Improvement for our new short movie

Character creation

• cgCookie Flex Rig provides a fully rigged, customizable character that fits perfectly our need (!)
• Easy overall customization provided
• Fine detail customization by shape-keys

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

Steps towards tools integration

• Hpc-Forge is our project hosting facility
• Allows the creation of projects, allow us to work on may project in parallel
• Manage user authentication and permission
• Connect projects to various resources and services
• coming soon: Git and OpenClouds

Improved Workflow for Laser Scan Data

• TODO: add details

RenderFarm enhancements

• Serves many projects in parallel
• Cycles support
• Inspect production files dependencies
• Sense SVN committ and propose Job to run
• To be opened to external customer
• the WebFrontEnd will be released as open source

Digital Libraries and Asset Metadata

• Digital Library as a mean to archive and share asset
• Promote reuse
• Metadata to document asset and improve searching
• a new WebApp to support Metadata creation/editing during production
• Metadata embedding

Conclusions