Beyond manual drafting: a restoration-oriented system

The production of drawings is a basic activity in restoration, archeology and cultural heritage (CH) didactics. The manual production of technical drawings is a complex process, both in terms of time and skills required. In this paper we present a computer-aided methodology to produce technical drawings of CH artifacts. A pre-requisite of our methodology is the acquisition of an accurate digital 3D model of the artifact, which is now possible at affordable costs using 3D scanning technology. We discuss the specific needs that a drafting system oriented to the CH domain should satisfy and we present the design, features and performances of a computer-aided drafting system, called Cavalieri. Cavalieri allows to manage the huge digital models produced with 3D scanning devices and supports easy specification of orthographic drawings and cut-through sections, which are given in output as very high-resolution images (with user-selected reproduction scale and printer resolution). We conclude with some results of Cavalieri's assessment in the framework of two restoration projects.