bccaec – E-MUSE Blog

BCC Arte & Cultura second edition launch

This morning at the MUDEC in Milan, they presented the new edition of BCC Arte & Cultura, for which we digitized tens of artworks, and created a 3D gallery: here is the official report

2025-12-01

BCC Arte e Cultura launch

We can finally talk about this! (If you look at the tags you might find a few related stealth posts)

For the past year or so, we’ve been working on the cataloguing and digitalization project of the art and cultural heritage assets of the BCC ICCREA group.

Overall 59 banks and 109 works were included. The results were an art book, a digital catalogue, and a 3D gallery. We created 3D models of buildings and sculptures, we photographed a few paintings, and most importantly we created the 3D gallery.

The project was announced in the rather wonderful Biblioteca Braidense, and it has already gained quite a bit of press:

We’ll be back soon with a thorough log of what we did, and how we did it.

(Also, there are still quite a few wrinkles to take care of, if you find any, drop us a line!)

2024-12-11

Tech tip: recover from “ERROR MOOV atom not found”

Today we had to give a video presentation for the technically unannounced BCC Arte & Cultura project, and that involved a whole lot of Blender animation renders. One of them, a long one that took hours in Cycles, crashed at the very end. We were exporting in mp4 format, which is easy to import in video editors, but is quite hard to recover if the file is not terminated correctly.

VLC wouldn’t open it, and FFMPEG threw a “ERROR MOOV atom not found” warning, and then was unable to process any data.

With no time to spare for another render pass, we found this forum thread: https://www.videohelp.com/software/recover-mp4-to-h264

It’s a tiny and self-explanatory command-line utility, that saved us and gave us a usable file in seconds.

The only problem is that it’s Windows only.

2024-10-23

Tip: use Tree to generate HTML directory listings

Part of our job in the BCC Arte & Cultura project is to provide the “high fidelity” visualizations for each artwork. For some that means one of our 3D scans, for others it’s simply a zoomable interface. Our clients are making a “standard” website and simply linking to our server for the high fidelity version. We are not done processing all the artworks, but we can provide the URL in advance, they are all ordered by a bank/author-title schema. I wrote a script for creating the folder structure, but then I wanted to provide a single page listing all the URLs to our clients.

With a bit of research I found out a oneliner using the tree command.

You can try the result on https://e-muse.it/bccaec

“opere” is just the relative path between the location where I’m running the command and the directory structure I wanted to transverse.

tree opere -d -H "https://e-muse.it/bccaec" > index.html

2024-09-06

Expedition report: BCC Arte & Cultura

The first half of this year was taken up by two large projects for BCC ICCREA. We’re doing the immersive components of the BCC Innovation Festival (a startup festival, we were among the winners of the first edition) and of BCC Arte & Cultura (an effort to catalogue the art and cultural heritage artifacts belonging to the banks of the group). For the latter, we went around Italy digitizing the most complex and 3D objects.

Logistics

At this point it’s not really clear what we’re allowed to publish, as legal departments are surprisingly slow in responding to our queries, so we are going to err on the side of caution. You’ll have to wait until the official announcement before we post the actual works that we’ve digitised, but there shouldn’t be any harm in discussing how we set up the logistics.

Sadly, these locations were largely connected too poorly to attempt to do the whole trip using public transport. We really wanted to be ecological, but we didn’t find a way to do it in the given time and cost constraints without heavily relying on cars.

Once we could confirm the availability of the works on a given day we found cheap accommodations on Booking, loaded all the equipment and all the team members in a car, and we generally tried to avoid traveling during working hours. Northern Italy was covered through a series of short trips, while central and southern Italy were covered sequentially, going roughly clockwise. Some extra trips had to be broken out of the main loop, we managed to make that convenient by relying on some really good friends, who very graciously hosted us.

The whole thing cost us a bit under €2000, which is not too shabby for a 3-person team. This figure includes highways, fuel, accommodation and food, but it does not include the wear and tear on my car. Or the fact that I forgot some lenses at a friend’s place.

What we digitized

Again, we’re not supposed to share images of the works, as many of them are copyright encumbered, so stay tuned for the official launch of the project. I don’t think there’s any arm in sharing a list of what we did, though:

Alla fine del Giorno, Alberto Sughi, oil on canvas
Natività, Ilario Fioravanti, painted ceramics
Presepe, Capuano Brothers, multiple materials
Ducal Palace and several artifacts, in Mafalda
Ut Unum Sint, Arnaldo Pomodoro, outdoor metal stele
Bank building, Ugo Pagliara, building and architectural drawing
Carrù Castle, building
Chandelier made of Murano glass, 3 paintings, near Venice
Acquaviva Picena, whole building (we ended up scanning the whole town)
Incontri al Maneggio, Silvano Spessot, iron and colored glass sculpture
Untitled, Nane Zavagno, steel sculpture
Pinocchio, Venturino Venturini, bronze sculpture
Sant’Antonio Abate, Luca della Robbia, painted ceramics
Bank builiding, part of the Gradara castle-town
Bank building in Alba (no drones for this one, we had to climb literal towers!)
Assalto all’Olimpo, Bruno Liberatore, bronze sculpture (a much larger version is in Rome)
Untitled, Cesare Berlingeri, bent and stacked colored paper
An archeological site in Rome, featuring Imperial-age fresco-ed walls and a very well preserved Roman road

2024-09-05

Tag: bccaec