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771 points abetusk | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.663s | source
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mmooss ◴[] No.41878445[source]
Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to the Apollo 11 space capsule.

Has anyone used these in games? They would be great easter eggs and they have artistry and design that is far beyond almost anything DIY.

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diggan ◴[] No.41878586[source]
> Has anyone used these in games?

No doubt someone has put some of them into games. However, most likely not in it's original shape/form, as the scans usually produce highly inefficiently (but high resolution, great for renders) meshes. The meshes from scans tend to be a mess, and when inserting a 3D model for games, you care a lot about how optimized the meshes are, and that the mesh has a low polygon count as otherwise you'll tank the performance quickly.

So since a developer couldn't just copy-paste the model into the game (requires a prepass to fix issues/optimize before import), it'll take valuable time from other things for just this easter egg. Again, no doubt someone has done this at one point or another, but that's probably why it isn't as common as someone could think.

As an example, take a look at the wireframe of the Rosetta Stone (https://i.imgur.com/rtpiwjZ.png | https://github.com/BritishMuseumDH/rosettaStone/blob/master/...) and you'll see what I mean. For a high quality rock-like object, you'd probably aim for 2000-5000 triangles, while the Rosetta Stone scan seems to have 480,000 triangles straight from the scanning software.

Sadly, it's simply too much detail to be able to import straight up. Luckily, Nanite ("Virtualized Geometry") and similar implementations starts to give us tools so we can stop caring about things like this and let the game engine optimize stuff on the fly.

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1. gknoy ◴[] No.41881964[source]
I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!

It's not Rodin, but the game Horizon: Forbidden West has a segment where you get to view + interact with renderings of some paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. I've seen some of these in person at a museum in San Francisco, but somehow the experience was more meaningful in the game, despite having comparative potato quality compared to real life. I think what made the difference was that in the game, each painting had several lines of dialogue about what the painting represented, or elements thereof represented, about what was going on when the artist created it, etc, and the dialogue choices included questions I would never have thought to ask about in person.

I know that museums have virtual tours that have ausio descriptions like that about the art pieces, but I've never managed to take advantage of them. Can you imagine being able to take a high-detail virtual tour (even if not in VR) of a museum like the one in the article, or the Louvre, where you could spend as long as you want looking at every painting, zoom in at details like brushwork or how the light hits it, and have an expanding set of accessible narration (or readable text) about each item?

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2. autoexec ◴[] No.41885004[source]
> I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!

Outside of virtual tours, death match in a museum would be fun too. It might be cool to see where popular works of art end up in post-apocalyptic/future settings too.

Even less popular artworks could help add to the art that appears in video games. It can help cut down on the costs of using stock images or creating "generic" art in-house and hopefully create more impressive and immersive environments.

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3. turol ◴[] No.41889883[source]
> death match in a museum would be fun too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh40nFH4-A0