Video: Il piccolo Masaccio e le Terre Nuove

cinecavisitlab writes:

Commissioned by the Museum of the New Towns, “Il piccolo Masaccio e le Terre Nuove” is a short animated Computer Graphics educational movie, developed by Cineca VisitLab with manifold techniques and mainly aimed to the younger audience of the museum. For enhancing the possible identification, the main character is a kid of the early 1400’s, a young version of the painter Masaccio, one of the illustrious citizens of the town of San Giovanni. The Vicar, city ruler of the time, explains to the young Masaccio, and to the audience, about the city, its birth and creation on the ground of the rational rules underlying its design.
The video presents a series of very different solutions, such as:

live shots, taken also by drone;

2D drawings executed with a digital tablet;

drawings sketched with traditional techniques, such as India ink and watercolours;

Computer Graphics, with traditional and procedural modelling, photogrammetry, also for textures;

crowd, cloth and particle simulations;

a digital library for the vegetation of the time;

digital videos taken from Google Earth.

All of this complexity is displayed in order to fascinate a museum audience of adults and children, transfer knowledge, stimulate the interest towards other sections of the museum while keeping a high level of scientific accuracy. An effort able to produce, also, a wealth of reusable 3D assets for a future cross-media exploitation.
Technical information:

Blender 2.78 - 2.79

Rendered with Cycles render engine

PhotoScan Agisoft

CityEngine ESRI

CrowdMaster

ngPlant

Papagayo NG

Krita

the GIMP

Adobe creative suite

Blender Render Farm on 2.79

8 scenes for a total of 72 shots

160k h/core of rendering

To see the full movie you have to visit the Museum in San Giovanni Valdarno in Italy, but here you can have a preview with the trailer!
Hope you enjoy it.