Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/786150
j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 7 c g w 2 7 houses the third largest collection of an- cient Greek and Roman sculpture owned by an Italian state museum. Today, it's best known for its impressive collection of paintings, but from the 16th to 18th centuries, the Uffizi was primarily famous for its ancient sculpture, which the Medici purchased in Rome and transferred to Florence. In that period, the Uffizi's art collection was even called "The Statue Gallery" ("Galleria delle Statue"). The main goal of the VWHL project is to revive interest in the museum's sculpture collection by making it freely available through interactive 3D models on the Internet. "Our project aims to raise the profile of the ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in the Uffizi," Frischer says. "So many modern visitors walk past the statues with very little appreciation of what they are seeing, as they make the long trek from one amazing gallery of paintings to another. But in its first three centuries, the Uffizi's reputation rested on its sculpture." As Frischer points out, things shied in the 19th century when, thanks to the Romantics, Gothic painters like Giotto, and Renaissance masters like Raphael and Michelangelo, started to outshine the an- cient sculptors. "We hope that through our project, the statues will once again receive the attention they deserve," he adds. The challenge of the Uffizi project is its scale: No one has ever tried to digitize such a large collection of sculpture, though advancements in technology have made the process much quicker. Ten years ago, Frischer could only digitize one sculpture a year; now he and his small team of doctoral students can complete eight in a single day. "This project was mainly possible because of two key breakthroughs in soware that have occurred in the past five years: the arrival of robust, reliable photogrammetry and the implementation of WebGL by most Web browsers," Frischer points out. Photogrammetry means that students can capture the 3D data of a statue by using digital cameras instead of dedicated devices such as laser and structured light scanners. Cameras are much less expensive than dedicated scanners, and the data col- lection can be done in orders of magnitude faster by digital photography as compared to scanning. The team uses a Nikon D810 and Sony a6300 for photography, with Agiso Photo- Scan and Capturing Reality's RealityCapture for processing the photogrammetric data. Then they put the final touches onto the 3D model with Pixologic's ZBrush. M O D E L I N G T H E M O D E L S 3D digital modeling oen encounters a barrier when confronted with the kind of complex geometry that characterizes most sculpture, but photogrammetric soware largely automates the task of converting the raw data into a 3D model. With fast video cards, the photogrammet- ric soware the teams use can process the raw data much faster compared to the lengthy workflow of processing scan data. Finally, thanks to WebGL, they then publish the final product – interactive 3D models of the statues as elements of Web pages – which makes studying the pieces easier and more straightforward. The average life-size statue requires approximately 500 photographs; the model obtained from that contains one point per pixel. Since the Nikon D810 takes photos that are 36 megapixels, this means that the average raw model has 500x36,000,000 points, or 18 billion data points.