Photogrammetry of cast collection, technical and analytical methodology of a digital rebirth

Before the use of photography and digital projections, cast collections had a major place in Archaeology and History of Art studies. Replacing the original content, they permitted in different manners to touch the past in a safety and unobtrusive way :watch, touch and manipulate the cast allowed proactively students to learn the techniques of the ancient masters. Nowaday cast collections lays in university corridors or in museum storage waiting to be restored due to their material properties, the degradations of time, and the difficulty to use them in a course. Thinking about their past didactic roles, the Université Libre de Bruxelles wanted primarily a way to restore and preserve her antique study cast collection and, in the same way, give it a new sight as a nowaday collection study. For three months, in the same time of cast restorations, PANORAMA team have developed a photogrammetric workflow to produce and treat photographic shooting, texture delighting, point clouds reconstruction, meshing, retouching, simplifying, retopologizing, relighting and at the end of the whole process, web publishing. Through this paper, the PANORAMA photogrammetric reconstruction methodology will be introduced and particularly the texture delighting process developed to enhance texture details and easily reintegrate models as a fully usable 3D asset in any 3D scene.