From Historical Silk Fabrics to Their Interactive Virtual Representation and 3D Printing

Abstract

The documentation, dissemination, and enhancement of Cultural Heritage is of great relevance. To that end, technological tools and interactive solutions (e.g., 3D models) have become increasingly popular. Historical silk fabrics are nearly flat objects, very fragile and with complex internal geometries, related to different weaving techniques and types of yarns. These characteristics make it difficult to properly document them, at the yarn level, with current technologies. In this paper, we bring a new methodology to virtually represent such heritage and produce 3D printouts, also making it highly interactive through the tool Virtual Loom. Our work involves sustainability from different perspectives: (1) The traditional production of silk fabrics respects the environment; (2) Virtual Loom allows the studying of silk heritage while avoiding their degradation; (3) Virtual Loom allows creative industries to save money and materials; (4) current research on bioplastics for 3D printing contributes to environmental sustainability; (5) edutainment and gaming can also benefit from Virtual Loom, avoiding the need to acquire the original objects and enhancing creativity. The presented work has been carried out within the scope of the SILKNOW project to show some results and discuss the sustainability issues, from the production of traditional silk fabrics, to their dissemination by means of Virtual Loom and 3D printed shapes.

"La preservación, difusión y accesibilidad del patrimonio cultural desde las nuevas tecnologías"

“…Entre los resultados más importantes figura el tesauro multilingüe en cuatro idiomas (León Muñoz et al 2019), que permite a los usuarios utilizar términos y frases locales en sus búsquedas, contribuyendo así a normalizarlas. Otro es el Telar Virtual (Portalés Ricart et al 2021), una herramienta innovadora que produce representaciones tridimensionales de tejidos a nivel de hilo y preserva técnicas históricas del textil, la mayoría de las cuales sólo son conocidas por artesanos que suelen transmitir oralmente sus conocimientos (Pérez 2020). También el proyecto cuenta con un buscador de datos y análisis sobre el patrimonio de la seda, ADASilk (Advanced Data Analysis for Silk heritage), que integra un motor de búsqueda exploratoria y un mapa espaciotemporal (Sevilla 2021) construido sobre el grafo de conocimiento de SILKNOW, que contiene casi cuarenta mil entradas de tejidos con imágenes y otra información relevante que los describe.…”

A Low-Cost Contactless Overhead Micrometer Surface Scanner

“…Though the study of fabrics is related to heritage [24] and industrial applications, ways to digitize textiles and fabrics are constrained in the products reviewed in Appendix B. These approaches do not scan the fabric in sufficient resolution to reveal the fine crafting of some textiles.…”

Construction of Knowledge Graph of 3D Clothing Design Resources Based on Multimodal Clustering Network

“…However, there are still many defects in the current online virtual 3D clothing design room: first, the 3D clothing design system generally adopts the garment stitching technology, and the time complexity of the clothing modeling algorithm is relatively large, which affects the real-time performance of the system [ 6 – 9 ]. The system is located on the central server.…”