Computer Graphics World - graphics, 3d modeling, cad... -
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Published on: 3/1/2003
Last Visited: 3/4/2003
"Through the simulation, museum patrons can see how the collection was originally presented by the sisters, in a space that no longer exists," says UMBC associate professor of visual arts Alan Price, who co-directed the project with Dan Bailey, IRC director.
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"We also interviewed people who actually lived in the building when the sisters lived there," says Bailey."We even talked with Ed Cone, a nephew of the sisters who often visited them when he was young."
Building a Home
By piecing together information from the interviews, the team determined the exact location of the apartments inside the building.Then, using Alias|Wavefront's Maya, the IRC team began constructing the homes wall by wall, room by room, as they existed when the women lived there.
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Bailey and Price estimate that the synthetic apartments are accurate to within a 4-inch margin, based on their research data.
Perhaps more daunting than re-creating the floor space was the task of precisely modeling and placing more than 1800 digital objects and works of art (which includes 165 paintings and 37 sculptures) inside the 3D space.To help the students with this task, the museum provided 37 archival photographs of the residences taken during the 1930s and 1940s, 34 of which were reconciled within the project.
"The Cone Collection, with its many Matisses, was well known even when the sisters were alive, and as a result, it was extensively photographed," explains Bailey.However, because the photos weren't labeled well, the digital artists spent a great deal of time trying to figure out which room each picture was from."The process required a lot of research and patience," he adds, "but we believe we are 100 percent accurate in terms of positioning all the imagery from the photos."All told, the group reconstructed 13 rooms. (No research data was found for the undetermined number of remaining rooms, so they were not re-created for the project.)
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"The paintings were the easiest items to re-create," notes Bailey.
To manage the project, the team installed a Web-based image-mapping system that enabled anyone from the museum or the IRC to update models or obtain information about the project."We had some people who did the modeling and others who inspected them to ensure they were accurate in terms of size and color, and the database helped keep us on track," says Bailey.Once the models were completed, they were inserted into the virtual space with Maya.Then, the data was exported to Virtools' Dev software, where the interactivity was programmed.
Because the application was rendered in real time, the team had to be conscious of each object's resolution."We used every computer game trick in the book to represent, for example, a chair, with as few polygons as possible, yet still have it look photorealistic," says Bailey.Often, the solution involved trial and error."We'd run the models through the engine and then play them back to see how fast they'd render," he adds."If they didn't render fast enough, we'd do it again-just like in game development."
Despite these efforts, there were instances when a scene-viewed from a particular angle-became too complex to render in real time."The apartments had archways, not doorways, so as you go from one room to another, you might see into two adjoining rooms from that one perspective, which forces us to show all the information in one frame," Price explains."Because of that, we couldn't get away with simple Z clipping.Instead, we had to come up with ways of 'hiding' objects that are out of sight around the corners."
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"As desktop computers with sophisticated graphics cards became more powerful, it was suddenly possible for institutions and individuals to complete a project like this without using a quarter-million-dollar SGI machine," says Bailey."And, this real-time interactive tour was a perfect application for showcasing that ability."At the museum, the simulation runs on a 2ghz Pentium 4 Dell Computer equipped with an Nvidia Quadro2 Pro graphics card.It also uses an NEC Technologies' 42MP2 plasma display with a Smart Technologies' Smart Board touch-sensitive overlay.
Bailey notes that it is rewarding to see all types of people using the museum installation, reinforcing the co-directors' other goal-to make the complex technology and navigational system easy to use."In general, this type of technology is directed toward entertainment venues and kids," he says.
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