The Parthenon

Abstract

This animation uses new computer graphics research to present a visualization of the Parthenon and its sculptures. The sculptures are shown in their current location in the British Museum, as well as where they were originally placed on the Parthenon. The film begins with models of the Parthenon's frieze, metopes, and pediment sculptures. These sculptures were scanned from high-quality casts in the Skulpturhalle Basel using a custom-structured light 3D scanning system. A Christian column carving and a Turkish-era cannonball impact were recorded on-site using a photometric stereo technique. Using high-dynamic-range time-lapse illumination, a complete day of light is simulated on a 90-million-polygon model of the Parthenon obtained through laser scanning the structure with a Quantapoint time-of-flight laser range scanner. Fifty-three panoramic scans were assembled using the MeshAlign 2.0 software from CNR Pisa and post-processed using GSI's GSI Studio software. New inverse global illumination reflectometry techniques were used to recover lighting-independent texture maps for the Parthenon, and renderings were created using Monte Carlo-based global illumination. The time-lapse image-based lighting was chosen from one of several days recorded in Marina del Rey, California using a new HDR capture process. Rendering this sequence virtually allowed us to show the Parthenon without scaffolding and tourists, and to design the camera moves and lighting in postproduction. The sequence ends with a sunset seen from a virtual reconstruction of the Erechtheion featuring scanned models of the Caryatid figures.

Physically Based Rendering of Synthetic Objects in Real Environments

“…Recent work has also proposed methods for extracting area light sources from a single light probe guided by user input to recover depth information [21]. Time-of-flight laser scanning and inverse rendering techniques have also been used to recover diffuse reflectances of surfaces in the scene [28,47]. However, these methods have previously been constrained to small scenes in controlled environments or required extensive manual processing to produce high quality results.…”

Story Guided Virtual Environments in Educational Applications

“…There are numerous examples of virtual reconstructions of different historical sites from all around the world [24,40,22,28,23,37,25,35]. Another type of promotion and preservation of cultural heritage is the creation of virtual museums [9,8,7,6,3,2,13,14,16,15,18,17,12,11,10].…”

Scene Reconstruction and Visualization From Community Photo Collections

“…Traditionally, the input data for these approaches are images or videos captured specifically for the purpose of reconstruction. In many cases, capture conditions such as camera positions or illumination need to be tightly controlled (e.g., the system of Debevec et al, used to capture the shape and reflectance of the Parthenon [12], [14] required a carefully controlled capture setup). In contrast, images in a community photo collection are typically captured by different photographers under uncontrolled conditions.…”

“…However, it is not possible to take objects like the Statue of Liberty or the Notre Dame Cathedral into the lab. Other techniques that work in outdoor settings need additional information about the lighting during capture [12], [14], [78]. Can we recover material properties solely from community photo collections where lighting is neither known nor controlled?…”