MeshLab on YouTube

Just a short post of a video created by Nicolò dell'Unto (a PhD student at IMT)
about the use of MeshLab and Arc3D for building up a 3D model of an archeological excavation and showing it inside a cave.



Side note, the data was collected during a workshop of the 3DCOFORM training series on “3D acquisition and post-processing” that took place at The Cyprus Institute in Nicosia on 2-6 November 2009 and that, among other things focused on the use of MeshLab for Cultural Heritage related activities.

3D scanning and unrolling an ancient seal

A few lines on an interesting recent project I participated and that exploited MeshLab processing abilities.
The project whose results are now shown in a exhibition at the Louvre involved the scanning with non traditional technologies of the very small and wonderful ancient Cylinder Seal of Ibni-Sharrum (photo © CRMF / D. Pitzalis), a precious antique mesopotamic artifact that is considered one of the absolute masterpieces of glyptic art.

This small seal was digitally acquired at CRMF at a very high resolution and with a variety of 3D scanning techniques (microprofilometry, x-ray Tomography, photogrammetric techniques) and, obviously, the results were processed and integrated entirely with MeshLab.

Among the nice things that we did inside MeshLab was the virtual unrolling of the seal, e.g. getting the inverse shape that you get when you roll the seal over a soft substance like clay or wax.  It was quite easy from a technical point of view, but very appreciated by the restorers that disregard invasive plaster based techniques that often can leave small residuals over the precious artifacts.  You can find more details on the whole acquisition and processing of the seal on this VAST conference paper.

 

On the side you can see a couple of renderings of the 2-million of triangle model of the unrolled seal; the renderings were done inside MeshLab, the first one is a simple flat shaded rendering, while the second one exploit a nice shader that I have recently added to the MeshLab shading arsenal, it mimics in a shameless way the ZBrush technique of varying shininess and color according to the "cavities" of the geometric model (they use it for the famous zbrush wax and bronze materials).  It is nice to see how the shading vastly improve the shape perception of the 3D model.
I have not seen many correct discussion on how to perform these kind of shading, so expects a post on that...


A massive physical reproduction (4 meters long!) of the unrolled seal is at the center of "OnLab" a thematic exhibition of Michel Paysant, that will open in the next days at Louvre, Denis Pitzalis worked a lot on this project and you can find  more details and photos in his blog.

MeshLab at Archeo-Foss

Just a short news about one of the many public presentation of MeshLab.
This time we will talk about MeshLab at the Archeo-Foss Workshop, the fourth Italian workshop on Free software, Open source and Open formats in the archaeological field. The workshop will be held in Rome on April 27-28, and it will be centered on the importance of open source sw and process in archaeology, not only considering the price issues, but also taking into account, long term sustainability and process documentation issues.

As you can imagine in this field MeshLab well cover the role of the open source alternative of the various high priced systems for 3D scanning data processing (most of them are priced in the 10k~30k $ range). In the Cultural Heritage environment budget resources are ofter very scarce and cost issues are seriously considered. Here source solutions play a very important role.

We often collaborate with many different CH institutions, working on wonderful ancient masterpieces. Something that often fully repay the effort done in the processing...

Below a few of the Lunigiana statue menhir that we recently acquired and processed (precisely he did most of the job, thanks Marco!).