Exploring the Naumachia of Parc Monceau with Minsar : Part 4
How I prepared the scene in Blender before importing it in Minsar for the final result
This is the last part of a four-part article presenting the technical and conceptual work-through of the experience:
- Part 1 — Context
The building itself, why I chose it for my experimentation and what were the goals of the experience. - Part 2 — How I found and chose the assets
The search for the assets, and why I chose them - Part 3 — How to optimize 3D models for real time applications
Basic concepts to use when you know very little about 3D modeling for real time applications - Part 4 — How I prepared the scene in Blender before importing it in Minsar for the final result
Temporary workaround in Blender, and experience crafting in Minsar!
Preparing the scene
Currently, Minsar doesn’t allow for parenting elements or for snapping them to another object (but we are working on it). That is why in my case, I had to resort to a temporary workaround to get exactly what I wanted. I had to prepare my scene into Blender so I could entire the entire ship full of warriors in Minsar. In the future, as the development of Minsar goes on, that step won’t be necessary anymore.
Placing the soldiers on the ship
I started with the Greek ship. I imported my combined Greek warrior into my Blender scene with the combined ship. To duplicate them and install them more easily, I used a tool in Blender which is called an “array”. I installed one rank of soldiers on one side of the ship. Then I flipped the warrior, and installed another rank on the other side of the ship. That way, each side of the ship was covered by shields.
Then I selected the combined ship as well as my warriors, and exported them together in one single glTF file. I’ll stress out the fact that here I could have combined the ship AND the warriors and made a single texture for them all. I chose not to do that because I felt I had optimized my model enough, and I was rather afraid that would cause the texture of the ship to lose too much detail.
The Roman ship
I then proceeded to install the Roman warriors on the Roman ship. In order to have the impression of two opposing sides, I decided to change the color of the ship from red to blue. In order to do that, I opened the texture of my Greek ship under Photoshop, selected all the red parts, and changed their color to blue.
In addition to the color, I truly hesitated a lot on whether I would add a specific part on the ship that would identify it as Roman: the aftercastle at the end of the deck that seems to have been a characteristic of Roman ships.
In the end, I decided not to add it for several reasons: first, I had already taken a lot of time in optimizing the models, and I wanted to try and keep to the most necessary manipulations. Turning the gladiator into a Greek warrior seemed necessary to me because I wanted a clear opposition between two different armies, and thus I chose symbols people are quite familiar with: a Roman soldier and a Greek soldier with his particular-shaped helmet. These symbols are, in my opinion, much more familiar than the aftercastle at the rear of the ship. I felt that adding that aftercastle would be redundant in that function, and it would mean entering too much into detail: if I truly wanted a historically accurate Roman ship, adding an aftercastle would not have been enough. For a start, I bet there are many more differences between a Greek and a Roman trireme. Yet as I am not a specialist and that my goal in this experience is NOT to recreate something historical but to give a representation of a certain spirit, a certain impression, I felt adding that aftercastle didn’t correspond to the general atmosphere of the experience.
Preparing the informative UI
After having prepared my 3D assets, I proceeded to recreating the UI with which Soraya Jaber is interacting at the end of the Opsucope video. The addition of that UI had two purposes: strengthen the resemblance between the video and the experience, and provide an opening to another fundamental aspect of my research: information given to the visitor.
One of the questions raised in this aspect is how to give the visitor the possibility to have information on what they are seeing without imposing it. I strongly believe, and this is what I am defending in my research, that there are several ways to approach Cultural Heritage (I wrote another Medium article about this particular question). In other words, I believe that a work of art can either be apprehended through knowledge and scientific information (which is the privileged approach in museums today) or through emotion, feelings and artistic experience.
However, at this stage of my research, I believe that whatever you propose to the public, you must be honest with them and explain what you tried to do. I really believe in the power of artistic reinterpretations of known works of art such as Lucid Realities’ virtual dive into Monet’s Nympheas, or of original artistic experimentations such as Pietro Alberti’s at the Lalande Hotel of Bordeaux. Yet, I feel that in all cases, the public should be aware of the subjective character of the experience. They should be encouraged to question what they are seeing, what they are told. That is also why I wrote this article: it gives more information about how I conceived the experience.
Currently in Minsar, we are working on triggers and animations. This will be decisive for my research about information and the way it is given to the visitors: I would like to experiment on a way to display information according to the level of detail the visitor wants. For now, the experience has to be designed as a static one. So I simply recreated the four elements we can see in the Opuscope video: the title to name the place, and the three small vignettes called “History”, “Architecture” and “Naumachia”.
The final result
Building the experience on site
I built the experience with an iPad Pro 2018, within about 15 minutes. I placed two Greek ships and two Roman ships, facing each other, ready to fight. Of course, as for the UI, the ships are static for now, and I can’t wait for the triggers and animations to be implemented in Minsar. Yet I was surprised by the striking effect it had in the afternoon sun. As for the UI, it might be interesting to search for a more discrete way to display it, maybe through an icon somewhere near the ships, or a small pop-up appearing according to what the visitor is watching.
As for the creation itself, it turned out to be a little bit painful. Indeed the iPad is quite heavy, and after a couple of minutes my back hurt quite a lot. All in all, the iPad is a formidable device to visualize an experience, and it can certainly provide an experience of creation for those (like me!) who cannot afford a Hololens or a Magic Leap, yet it confirmed how better an experience it is to create a scenography in a 3D immersive space. I can only hope that the XR devices will soon become more affordable for everyone to enjoy the experience of creating in 3D.
A particular relation to the past
The creation of this experience also stressed out something important: the feeling of time which has passed. Another core question in my research is the relation people have to the past. More precisely, how technologies such as XR can help materialize that relation, that feeling of time passing. I don’t know about you, but personally I don’t feel “attached” to the objects I see in a museum (and yet I have studied history of art, conservation-restoration and cultural mediation!). I don’t feel connected to them somehow. For some of them, of course, I can see they are ancient, I know they date back to over a millenium. And yet it is difficult to actually grasp that feeling of time, because the object has been put into another context: that of the museum. That context freezes the object in an eternal state, which is no longer the one it used to be.
In this experience, there are actually two co-existing “pasts”. Along with the attempt at reconstituting a certain idea of antique Naumachias, it is also a retrospective of the history of Minsar and Opuscope, and it is to that precise history that I truly felt connected. While watching the result of my work, I remembered watching that first Opuscope video, and I remembered how it made me think “Wow, I want to work with them”. I remembered arriving in the company, how I started building with them and how I decided to engage in a PhD thesis with them. And then, contemplating the experience I had just made, I started really grasping how far Minsar had come since its birth three years ago. I felt that I was truly taking part in the process of making a dream come true, the dream of giving life to Cultural Heritage. If I, simple employee of Opuscope, felt such a thing, imagine what Thomas Nigro and Soraya Jaber, the founders of Minsar, felt. When I showed them the pictures of my experience, they were deeply touched, and I found their reaction particularly moving.
Through this article, now ended, I wanted to explain every step, conceptual as well as technical, which eventually led me to the creation of my Naumachia experience with Minsar. In the first part, I started by setting the context of the experience, the place I had chosen as well as the goals of the experience. In the second part, I talked about the process I followed to search and choose my assets. Then I went further into detail to explain the basics of optimizing 3D models for realtime applications. At last in this ultimate part, I have gone through the actual process of creation of the experience with Minsar.
On the one hand, this entire experimentation allowed me to point out the functionalities we need to improve and develop in Minsar to provide a quicker and more immediate way to create 3D experiences. Even though the process of creation in-situ was satisfactory (save for the discomfort of using an iPad), I still had to resort to some technical workarounds to get exactly what I wanted (yet some choices were purely “artistic”, I could have skipped a lot of steps if I just wanted to use the models as they were). As a matter of fact, these functionalities are already worked on by the team, and I can’t wait to see them implemented, because I still find that creating with Minsar gives an impression of making magic happen right before your eyes.
On the other hand, this experimentation provided an interesting case of study about the relation we have to the past, both historical and personal. It also made me feel like there are still so many things to experiment in Minsar. For now the experience is static but already gives an impression of life. I am so excited at the idea of making this experience evolve along with the development of Minsar, and I can’t wait to see what it will be three years from now…
