An operational workflow for documenting and communicating architectural heritage: from survey to 3D printing

Digital surveying and rapid prototyping tech-niques are important tools to support process -es related to cultural and architectural heritage. Digital surveying can be used to document, ana-lyse, and enjoy the built heritage thanks to point clouds and detailed digital models resulting from the processing of data acquired during field ac-tivities. 3D printing, on the other hand, enables the creation of realistic physical replicas of her-itage artefacts that can support activities related to analysis, documentation, conservation, valori-sation and enjoyment. The use and combination of these techniques to architectural and cultural heritage have brought benefits and advantages since digital and physical replicas can be used in the processes of documenting, analysing, pre -serving and enhancing historical artefacts by pro-moting their accessibility on multiple levels. The paper discusses the results of research aimed at defining and testing an effective workflow for the development of physical models suitable for the analysis, documentation and communication of architectural heritage. The experimentation was performed considering as a case study a pe-culiar element of architecture, a historical portal. The paper illustrates the technical challenges faced starting from the photogrammetric survey to the digital reconstruction of the analysed arte-fact for 3D printing, with a focus on the printing parameter settings used to produce physical rep-licas with high-quality, but different resolutions and scales, to be used for several purposes, such as analysis and documentation and education and communication.