3d art

During my visit to the Celio Archaeological Museum in Rome, I was impressed by this Roman artifact from the 5th century AD. And I stole it. It's a stone disk with 16 faces carved on a pedestal, measuring approximately 60 x 150 cm. It was used to indicate wind directions, and as a good navigator, I was fascinated. I didn't steal it from the archaeological site—right in front of the Forma Urbis, the map of Rome—but in just a few minutes I produced an exact photogrammetric reproduction of it. It was created by triangulating 90 point-cloud photographs using Meshroom and Blender software.

A few minutes to acquire it, many hours to calculate it, and above all, to optimize the resulting model from millions of polygons. It took only about 90 shots and recomposed them with the photogrammetry software. The result is breathtaking: an exact replica of the object, including textures. I was able to do this because the sky was cloudy and the light was perfect for taking the shots that allow for photogrammetric recalculation: diffused and without shadows, so that the colors are not altered by shadows or direct light.

The result is a faithful and detailed 1:1 scale model. In a recess in the stone, you can even see the archive number 1623, handwritten by the archivists.

Discovered in 1932 near the Arch of San Lazzaro, it disappeared and was then recovered by Ludwig Pollak (a Jewish antiques dealer who was deported a few years later). The artifact was exhibited in the Antiquarium of the Celio. The 16 panels are sculpted with heads representing the winds and their relative directions, along with their Roman names.

The following are recognizable: I. BOREAS; IV. CIRCIVS; V. CHORVS; VII. EAONIVS; VIII. AFRICVS; IX. AUSTROF(ICV)S; XI. AVSTER; XII. EVRVS; XV. SOLANVS; XVI. AQVILONICE;

The gltf module

To display it here, I also developed a proprietary, dynamic Joomla module, useful for uploading 3D models, using the threeJS library. It also allows any element of the model to be clickable and interactive. For example, here, the wheel and license plate open pop-ups with additional information. The library offers enormous potential.

Click and use yoour mouse or fingers to rotate, pinch to zoom.