The Piacenza Cathedral, from the Digital Survey to a Complete Multimedia Documentation

Abstract 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 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 models were completely textured from the data gathered in an extended and specific photographic campaign. Even if a meaningful part of the data post processing was aimed to the creation of classic 2D drawings, the digital survey was also the base for the developing of multimedia presentations, while 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 point cloud 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.