The Piacenza Cathedral, from the digital survey to a complete multimedia documentation

The survey work of the Piacenza Cathedral was an extended, articulated and involving operation. Being the survey of such a complex building it took time and attention to produce a correct and complete documentation and a full and judicious coverage of all the exterior and interior parts of the whole church. The whole work was made thanks to the collaboration between the “Facoltà di Architettura” (now Dipartimento di Architettura) in Firenze and Area3D s.r.l. Livorno. The whole survey was a digitally born work, based on the use of both time of flight and phase shift technologies to allow a good, reliable, and easy to manage dataset. All the scans where aligned on a topographical network, based on specific targets and geometrical features, to allow a well working reference system and to optimize all the scanning operations reducing the need for large overlapping. The survey work started in 2008 but the final post processing process was completed in all its 2D and 3D products only in the late 2010. Overall it is worth to say that the quality and richness of the dataset can be considered as a work in progress and new and specific data treatments are still going on starting from the original pointclouds. The main task in the 2008-2010 productions was the realization of a complete 2D set of drawings, aimed to produce clear, detailed and great looking images of the state of the cathedral, with a full architectural detail about every meaningful elements. At the same time there was the creation of a full set of 3D surface models, dedicated to develop a digital animation for multimedia dissemination of this important monument. All the models were completely textured from the data gathered in an extended and specific photographic campaign. At the same time the 3D digital model was developed according to a logic aimed to produce a good and versatile base, capable to be reused for further BIM usage while for certain specific parts there was the testing of innovative visualization solution, like direct pointcloud visualization inside a rendering software based on the voxelization of the points. In general the work on this large building was guided to produce a “state of the art” work, careful about the architectural language, useful for documentation, monitoring and visualization and in its own way a “summa” of all the good procedure such a Built Heritage monument was worth to deserve for a contemporary and well working documentation.