Masters in the Forbidden City

VR || Simulation || Serious Game

Apr/2021

Producer & Photographer

The project inspiration comes from the documentary Masters in the Forbidden City. Focus on recording the repair process of rare relics.

Game Preview

Inspiration

This project inspiration comes from the documentary with the same name. The documentary focuses on recording the restorers and repair process of rare relics in calligraphy and paintings in the Palace Museum.I really want to promote this great cause so I take several panoramas in the Forbidden City and make this game.

The Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, was China's imperial palace throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties. In 1987, it was designated as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. Tourists and academics alike visited the Palace Museum to marvel at the site's beauty. Thanks to the Palace Museum, We can learn a lot of cultural relics restoration and cultural relics related knowledge in more details on its official website. And I finally successfully adapt the experience of the restorers into a vr game.

The documentary Masters in the Forbidden Cityfocuses on recording the repair process of rare relics in calligraphy and paintings of the Palace Museum, bronze wares, aulic watches, wooden wares, ceramics, lacquerwares, treasure inlaying, aulic embroidery and other fields as well as the life stories of repairers, and it was broadcast in CCTV-9 on January 7, 2016.

A relic repair example from:

https://www.dpm.org.cn/explore/protects.html Wallpaper from https://en.dpm.org.cn

Design

GamePlay:

Model:

Panorama:

My initial task was to create a compelling environment for the visitors. A believable environment is essential for bringing the Palace Museum to life, but it also necessitates a significant amount of effort. I intended to do photogrammetry (i.e. photo-scanning) for the environment, however due to insufficient school equipment, I was unable to do so. I'd merely gotten a panorama camera instead. As a result, our intention shifts to create panoramic views. The camera

automatically synthesizes panoramic photos, which saved us lots of work.

The only fly in the ointment is its precision pales in comparison to SLR

cameras, necessitating the recording of many photos at the same location

with varying exposures in order to obtain sharper HDRIs.

Program

Cultural relics takes a lot of practice and experience. I chose three most simple-to-learn assignments for the mend stage: derusting, assembling and antique finishing. In derusting and assembling, the player need firstly detect the rust or scratches, then click to remove them.

Rust and scratches are both "marker" objects from a technical standpoint. In the editor, markers are manually applied to the models' surfaces. Each marker then uses Newton iterations to determine the normal to the closest surface in runtime, and spawn a decal based on the marker's type.

When the user cursor passes over a marker with buttons down, the marker's "life" is lowered, which is then synchronized with the opacity parameter of the decal shader.

The most challenging component of the application was antique finishing. There are two stages to the technical level of painting. I construct a collection of render targets (a type of textures) in the first stage to replicate the painted GBuffer data as well as additional mesh information (e.g. vertex normals and positions). I used the PBR rendering method to restore the maximum realism to the artifacts. To solve this, I employed a name-map to quickly locate the reference of the correct render target.

In the second stage, a painter shader is estimated and output to each of the render targets. The render targets are assigned to the mesh's shader, allowing us to see the outcome in real-time. Thanks to render target management, we appropriately handle all GBuffer data, including PBR parameters like roughness and metallic