3DHOP for speleoarchaeology

Hello everybody,

today I go on writing about our speleoarchaeological project on the natural cave "Bus dela Spia". I prepared some material to share in later post, about the work-flow I followed in Blender, MeshLab, CloudComaper and GRASS GIS, but in the meantime I want to show the final result of my work in recovering old documentation (maps and sections), thanks to the FLOSS 3DHOP.

If you are a regular reader of ATOR, you know what I am speaking about. The software is developed by the Italian CNR (ISTI) and, more precisely, by the Visual Computin Lab (the same programmers who write the code of MeshLab). I chose this software due to its nice "slicer" tool, which allow the user to virtually cut a 3D model along one of the axis, to see other models hidden below (of course this is very useful in archaeology). This in not the only interesting tool (especially considering the updates of the last release), but, by now, is the one I want to show, also because I use it very often in another archaeological field: the Forensic Facial Reconstruction (in order to cut the face and show the cranium). Here below is a short video about this tool. Within 3DHOP are loaded 2 object: the Digital Terrain Model of the landscape and the 3D reconstruction of the "Bus dela Spia", performed in Blender. I hope you will enjoy it. Have a nice day!

ArcheOS Hypatia 3DHOP package (call for testing)

This short post is related with the previous one (about Nexus) and it is a call for testing for the deb binary package (arm64) of 3DHOP, the software developed by the Visual Computing Lab (CNR-ISTI, Pisa - Italy) to create interactive and multi-resolution web-galleries of 3D objects.

Here below you can see just an example of a gallery related with conflict archeology (WW 1), which we are developing in these days.

Example of a 3D web-gallery with 3DHOP (work in progress)

Being a Debian Jessie derivative distro, ArcheOS Hypatia will install 3DHOP in the folder /var/www/html/3dhop-3.0.
The best way to practice with this software is to modify the code of the different examples the package comes with (they are placed in /var/www/html/3dhop-3.0/examples).
For people that wants to help ArcheOS development and test this package, I upload it here. Soon we will prepare also 32-bit packages.

I hope this package will be useful! Merry Christmas and Happy new year!

PS

Marco Callieri (Visual Computing Lab - CNR-ISTI) notified me that Nexus and 3DHOP are under development right in these days, so there will be probably a new version in a short time. As soon as there will be changes, I will update the packages with the new functionalities.

WebRTIViewer

Hi all,

I write this post to complete the one +Rupert Gietl did regarding Large Scale Reflectance Transformation Imaging. As you read in that article, Rupert, using +GRASS GIS, re-built virtually the necessary light conditions to process an RTI image of an entire archaeological area. 

This is just one of the test we are carrying on with RTI techniques, since we are trying to evaluate this methodology under different aspects. Obviously, during our experiments, we encounter interesting researches carried on by other institutions. 

This post regards one of the projects we found on our way (I will write soon about other related works) and, more precisely, a software to share RTI images through internet: WebRTIViewer. Actually the source code of the application, an HTML5-WebGL viewer, is release under the therms of the General Public License 3 (GPL 3) on the website of its author: +Gianpaolo Palma.

Here is an example of its application, using Rupert's data of the archaeological site (better visualized here). To see it, just turno on the light and, holding the left button, move your mouse around.

The software comes with two binary tools (one for Windows 32 bit and the other for Windows 64 bit), which are necessary to prepare the RTI images for the viewer. For this reason I wrote to Giampolo Palma to ask if there would be the possibility to insert WebRTIViewer and the other applications in ArcheOS (to do this we would need the access to the source code of the binary tools, called webGLRTIMaker) and he kindly answered that he likes the idea and he would agree, but before to release the code of the webGLRTIMaker under an open license he will ask the opinion of his labs colleagues (the Visual Computing Lab). This institute, part of the Italian CNR-ISTI, is the same that develops other nice Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) software, usefull in archaeology, such as MeshLab, which is often in our post, or 3DHOP (soon a post about it). Hopefully, if everything goes well, we will have another nice tool to add to the ArcheOS software selection, helping Cultural Heritage professionals in sharing data through RTI technologies.

Here below you can see again webRTIViewer in action (better visualized here), this time with data coming from the archaeological excavation of Khovle Gora (in Georgia), where we work for the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and support technically the fieldwork directed by Dr. Walter Kuntner of the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik.