Reverse Modeling of Cultural Heritage: Pipeline and Bottlenecks

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The present work is suggested as a contribution to the debate on Reverse Modeling (RM) topic in the Cultural Heritage field. It wants to test the methodology, the limits and the bottlenecks of the RM pipeline in the architectural field, with particular attention to the geometric shapes reading and interpretation. The mathematical reconstruction of architectural models represents an overlaid result of anthropic and natural transformations framed inside a complex process of shape simplification and surface generation. This pipeline must be supported by a careful Heritage reading by means of architecture rules, both preserving the actual shape and the original intent of the building designer. The integration of these last two aspects make the process of RM applied to CH extremely complex. It involves a cognitive activity aimed at choosing on the one hand the best 3D survey technique to obtain reliable 3D data, on the other hand reaching a suitable architectural knowledge for achieving a plausible modeling result. The research presented describes a RM process applied to an ecclesiastical architecture, highlighting some key passages: an integrated survey approach to extract geometrical information, data analysis and generation of a mathematical 3D model, reliable from both a formal and cultural point of view.</p>

Virtual Representations of Cultural Heritage: Sharable and Implementable Case Study to Be Enjoyed and Maintained by the Community

“…In the BIM field, modelling practices for heritage have gained an increasingly prominent place [50][51][52][53]. However, immediately, limitations were identified [54] and, thus, there is a need to overcome them by optimizing the existing digital representation tools. Digital heritage models do not have as much difficulty incorporating accurate information within them, which is almost always related to the complexity of their forms.…”

A Procedure to Import a Complex Geometry Model of a Heritage Building Into Bim for Advanced Architectural Representations

“…As a result, identical decorations have slight variations in their shape, dimensions, etc. This non-regular geometry is complex to model by the previous procedure and requires a long time to reach an approximate shape (Camagni et al, 2019). Therefore, a process that require less modelling and is moderately fast was proposed, i.e.…”

“…However, we believe that the procedure deserves to be narrated as it has been part of the research of this work and has helped to understand the difficulties of modelling heritage buildings. We have tried to follow a process similar to that of Pepe et al, 2021 andCamagni et al, 2019 for the modelling of these decorations. Nevertheless, this procedure is possible if a highdensity survey and correspondent point cloud is available.…”

AR in the Architecture Domain: State of the Art

“…The surface normals are calculated during the meshing step, matching the relative RGB data with the vertices or the polygons. The final 3D model's reliability is dependent on accuracy and uncertainty concerning the acquisition instrument and the reverse modeling process applied [79]. In the end, the point clouds or polygonal models can be manually or automatically classified [80], depending on the ontologies present in the architecture detected and in the analysis process.…”