Virtual relighting of a Roman statue head from Herculaneum

Abstract

High-fidelity computer graphics offer the possibility for archaeologists to put excavated cultural heritage artefacts virtually back into their original setting and illumination conditions. This enables hypotheses about the perception of objects and their environments to be investigated in a safe and controlled manner. This paper presents a case study of the pipeline for the acquisition, modelling, rapid prototyping and virtual relighting of a Roman statue head preserved at Herculaneum in Italy. The statue head was excavated in 2006, after having been buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

Digitization of religious artifacts with a structured light scanner

“…Some examples are those carried out in the Church of San Francisco, the Church of A Coruña (Spain) (Pérez & Robleda, 2015), the Cathedral of Notre-Dame des Amiens (Crombez, Caron, & Mouaddib, 2015) and the Cathedral of Jaén (Soria, Ortega, Feito & Barroso, 2015). Some of these projects related to religious artifacts are performed outside of temples, as in the case of the ancient city of Herculaneum where the amazon woman's head was scanned (Happa et al, 2009). In 2003 some projects were carried out for the digitization and subsequent restoration of several sculptures located in the Cathedral of Santa Mara in Florence and the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, amongst many other Italian temples.…”

Formal and Informal Analysis of Rendered Space: The Basilica Portuense

“…In addition the light created by such luminaires should react appropriately with the scene. Thus, smoke and dust particles should influence them (Gutierrez et al 2008, Hawkins et al 2005, the illumination of the surrounding environment such as the sky (Happa et al 2009), and environmental factors such as rain should behave accurately in the scene (Wang et al 2006;Garg and Nayar 2006). The light should react with surfaces in ways appropriate to their physical formfor example, the colour expressed as the dynamic range of the surface materials Happa et al 2010), the surface reflectance properties (Müller et al 2005, Callet et al 2010, the scattering of light within materials such as marble and skin (Hašan et al 2010) and the perception of these as a function of motion, depth of focus and accommodation to brightness (Ledda et al 2004;Chalmers et al 2007).…”

“…Indeed, even where a need beyond cultural heritage exists it may be that research has not been undertaken for other reasons. For example, as Happa (et al 2009) notes there is limited research in rendering environments with very low lighting levels, including environments at night. Many of the luminaires associated with archaeological environments function at such low energy levels that the algorithms available, and indeed the hardware to consume and interact with them, are less well developed than in environments lit by modern artificial luminaires.…”

Reverse-Engineering History: Re-presenting the Chichester Tablet Using Laser Scanning and 3D Printing

“…In many of these publications, authors strongly advocate the potential of utilizing 3D data for engaging audiences across the sphere of cultural heritage, although these articles rarely detail a concrete example of public use (Laycock et al 2015;Al-Baghdadi 2017). Less common are case studies of workshops or exhibitions presenting 3D data directly to audiences through media such as AR, VR, or 3D printing (Happa et al 2009;Dima, Hurcombe, and Wright 2014;Galeazzo 2017;Jung and Tom Dieck 2017). Some authors go so far as to perform evaluations on these applications, though these are few and far between (Nofal et al 2018;Pollalis et al 2018).…”