New tutorial in the Mesh Editing session of DADP

Hi all,
after my teaching in the Master Open Téchne 2013 about Computer Vision (SfM and IBM), i'm updating the Mesh Editing session (english page) inside the Digital Archaeological Documentation Project.

Up to now I inserted four videotutorials:

how to create a poisson mesh inside MeshLab

how to georeference a point cloud in CloudCompare using a Cartesian coordinates system

how to erase not useful points inside CloudCompare

MeshLab: difference between vertex color, raster color and texture 

how to import Bundler's camera positions inside MeshLab

i hope this is useful :)

Neanderthal II - time lapse video of a forensic facial reconstruction by Sculpt Mode on Blender

I really fell in love by Cycles and Sculpt Mode in Blender. It's fun and nice to work this way.

Thereby, when a person is in this state of mind, nothing more understandable than to show for everybody his passion.

A way that I found to do this thing, was editing a video in time lapse of the process of reconstruction.

Originally was recorded a lot of hours of FullHD video (22 GB of raw data!), edited in few more than 13 minutes.

I hope you enjoyed.

A big hug and I see you in the next!

Homo heildelbergensis - forensic facial reconstruction with Sculpt Mode on Blender

In the last article I showed a forensic facial reconstruction rendered in Cycles.

I think that is an excellent renderer and already is my mainly tool for this task.

After change of renderer I experienced the new way to modeling: using the Sculpt Mode on Blender.

This is an interesting alternative to make more realistic surface, with all irregularities of an organic shape. And the most important: It's fun!

When you sculpts in blender, you have to make it in steps, starting in one subdivision of mesh until the number you need.

I'm not an expert in sculpting, but if you wanna more information about this technic, and even try to do it, see this videotutorial: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/06/13/creating-realistic-head-blender/

I hope you enjoyed.

A big hug!

Turkana boy - forensic facial reconstruction rendered in Cycles

Second Wikipedia:

Turkana Boy, also occasionally, Nariokotome Boy is the common name of fossil KNM-WT 15000, a nearly complete skeleton of a hominid who died in the early Pleistocene. This specimen is the most complete early human skeleton ever found. It is 1.5 million years old. Turkana Boy is classified as either Homo erectus or Homo ergaster.

The new and interesting thing about this reconstruction is that for the very first time I used Cycles to render the images.

Cycles is a internal renderer in Blender that have global illumination and allow you see the rendered image almost in realtime.

This is not a so new technology,  but in Blender 2.66 is already possible rendering hair, what was not possible in past releases.

If you wanna more information about how Cycles works, please see here: http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/introduction-to-cycles/

If you wanna know how configure hair in CYcles, see this link: http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/how-to-render-hair-with-cycles/

I hope you enjoyed.

A big hug!

Homo erectus pekinensis - Forensic facial reconstruction using a CT-Scan reference

Second Wikipedia:

"Peking Man, Homo erectus pekinensis, is an example of Homo erectus. A group of fossil specimens was discovered in 1923–27 during excavations at Zhoukoudian (Chou K'ou-tien) near Beijing (written "Peking" before the adoption of the Pinyin romanization system), China. More recently, the finds have been dated from roughly 750,000 years ago, and a new 26Al/10Be dating suggests they are in the range of 680,000–780,000 years old."

In order to make this facial forensic reconstruction was used a CT-Scan of a modern man.

After it was reconstruction in 3D and imported in Blender, a modifier called Lattice was used to make the deformation of the skull (and the skin) to match with the pekinensis skull.

The sequence of reconstruction process was the same used in Taung Child.

I hope you enjoyed.

A big hug!

Cro-Magnon - yet another forensic facial reconstruction

Second Wikipedia:

"Cro-Magnon  is an informal name for the first early modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens) of the European Upper Paleolithic".

Thanks to Prof. Dr. Moacir Elias Santos from Brazil that sent an 3D scanned skull (by PPT) the reconstruction was possible.

A tissue depth table used for this work was De Greef et Al (tip of Heritage Malta). The reference was modern europeans.

The sequence of the works have not special. It was the same of past articles.

I hope you enjoy.

A big hug!

ArcheOS Theodoric CAD metapackage

Hi all,

with this post I would like to start a series of report about ArcheOS 5 (Theodoric) development, both to keep you informed on the state of the art of the new release and to have more feedback from the community (nowadays ATOR reaches about 7000 or 8000 readers per month). 

As most of you know, Fabrizio Furnari had the good idea to reorganize ArcheOS software selection into different metapackages (divided by the topic already used for the archaeological menu). This will optimize the software management (from the developers point of view) and will spare users time during the installation process (everybody will be able to install just the applications he really needs).

Today I will shortly describe the CAD (Computer-Aided Design) metapackage. For thins kind of software we decided to proceed on the path of ArcheOS 4 (Caesar, beta release), confirming the choice of LibreCAD, for 2D operations, and FreeCAD for 3D. 

In the image below, you see, for example, the use of LibreCAd to rebuild a 2D Cartesian coordinates system, trough triangulation (it can be useful in those cases where it is impossible to use total stations or GPS to record Ground Control Points, for photomapping, or other archaeological elements).

Building a Cartesian coordinates system through triangulation in LibreCAD

In this other screenshot, you can see the use of FreeCAD during the architectural documentation of the church of S. Maria Assunta in Riva del Garda (Trentino, Italy).

FreeCAD (Architectural documentation)

Unfortunately, for this category of applications, we are not yet able to evaluate, from an archaeological point of view, the software BRLCAD, which seems to have great potentialities. For ArcheOS Theodoric release, we decided to exclude BRLCAD form the software selection, but it is till under observation. 

We will go on testing the use of BRLCAD for archaeological purposes, but if someone of you has the necessary knowledge for the application of this software in cultural heritage (or has some feedbacks about it), please contact us (or simply reply this post). Thanks to your help we hope to improve ArcheOS faster and faster!