Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In the past two years, Chinese traditional culture has frequently emerged.

From last year's CCTV Spring Festival Gala stunning the whole network "only this green" to this year's public praise "anchor step bridge," from Henan TV "Tang Palace night banquet""Mid-Autumn wonderful night" screen, to Sanxingdui cultural relics of the whole network attention, then think of these years of national tide, Han clothing tide, classics hot...

It can be said that Chinese traditional culture is ushering in the best era of rejuvenation.

In this context, there has recently been another exciting news for many fans of classical Chinese style: the digital library of the head IP of Chinese ancient books "Yongle Grand Ceremony" has been successfully launched!

Friends who understand Yongle Dadian should know that this is a set of large-scale books compiled in Yongle years of Ming Dynasty.

It preserves Chinese historical geography, literature, art, philosophy and encyclopedias before the 14th century, covering not only classics, history, books and collections, but also astronomy, geographies, yin and yang, medical divination, monks and Taoism, skills and other knowledge.

This encyclopedia has a total of 22877 volumes, divided into 11095 volumes, and the encyclopedia is about 370 million words. It is the earliest and largest encyclopedia in China, more than 300 years earlier than the encyclopedia compiled by Diderot in France and the Encyclopedia Britannica in Britain.

It was truly a cultural treasure of the Eastern world.

However, unfortunately, for hundreds of years, wars had broken out one after another, and the fate of Yongle Grand Ceremony had also been displaced and suffered heavy losses.

At present, there are only more than 400 incomplete copies in the world and more than 200 copies in China. This time, the high-definition image database of Yongle Grand Ceremony has published 40 volumes for the first time, which can be browsed by logging in to the ancient books digitization platform "Reading Ancient Books."

▲ Hundreds of years of historical turmoil led to the dispersion of the ceremony

Such a significant thing is planned and guided by the National Leading Group for the Collation and Publication of Ancient Books, approved by the National Library Publishing House, and designed and developed by Beida-Byte Digital Humanities Open Laboratory.

Overall, the project is a model for collaboration between government agencies, universities and technology companies.

This project has been established since November 2021, led by Guotu Publishing House, and the participants are mainly the R & D team of ByteDance and the experts of ancient books of Peking University. The former provides technical, creative and design support, while the latter provides academic background and advice on web design.

In nearly a year, both parties started from content, implemented to design, and then returned from design to content, polishing the product over and over again.

Let's look at the final results.

First open the website, classical, elegant and in line with the modern aesthetic style.

The main page is divided into 6 sections, namely, first appearance, flowing light, rare beauty, pearl couplet, jade decoration and heritage compilation. The name is elegant and full of ancient rhymes.

The two largest points of the initial plate are an ancient book of 3D animation model. Click the corresponding button to rotate and turn pages. In this scene, the user has an immersive experience of feeling and touching the ancient book.

The ancient book model is surrounded by jade seal and pen, ink, paper and inkstone. The bottom of the home page is divided into three columns: overview of the ceremony, size of the book and number of volumes. Users can click in turn to further understand the content, size and number of volumes of the ceremony intuitively.

Streamer plate page is also animated background, pavilion pavilion, cigarette curl, bell chirping bird chirping, set off the thick feeling of ancient books.

This section is equivalent to a section of popular science introduction, focusing on presenting several historical nodes of Yongle Grand Ceremony for hundreds of years, including six nodes: the publication of Hongpian, rebirth in the bath of fire, self-theft, the connection of soldiers, the scattering of broken chapters and the return of pearls in Hepu. Click in turn to understand the fate and history of the Grand Ceremony more clearly.

The third section mainly introduces the compilation method and content of the Grand Dictionary, which is the largest book in ancient China, retaining the original text of many ancient books and including a large number of ancient books of Song and Yuan Dynasties.

The fourth section provides the retrieval function of the code, including rhyme checking and rhyme compilation, where you can retrieve the specific chapters of the code through the rhyme department.

The fifth plate is composed of jade, which lists the collected documents in Yongle Dadian, highlighting the documentary value and historical value of the Dadian.

The last section is the legacy edition, showing the current distribution of Yongle Grand Ceremony. There is an earth model in the page. Users can rotate the model and interact with each other to intuitively understand the distribution and collection information of the Grand Ceremony.

On the whole, the refinement, elegance and immersion of the digital library of Yongle Grand Ceremony are impressive. The six sections of the website present a linear logic, which enables people to have a clear understanding of the arrangement method, content source and external history of the Grand Ceremony. Moreover, the six plates have relatively smooth connection and transition in interaction, background animation and sound effects are also well made, which can be called blockbuster experience.

The ability to realize this excellent viewing and interactive experience is inseparable from the excellence of ByteDance and the team of experts in ancient books of Peking University, among which the breakthrough and application in technology are especially worth mentioning.

I believe you can feel it when you experience it. One of the biggest highlights of this Yongle Grand Ceremony digital library is 3D. It is 3D that allows Yongle Grand Ceremony to be presented in front of everyone in an intuitive, natural and immersive way. The technical team responsible for the 3D solution is ByteDance.

Specifically, the technical team that transplanted 3D technology to the ancient book reading platform, ByteDance (ByteDance) solved the following problems:

360 degrees restore the original appearance of Yongle Grand Ceremony;

Control 360 degree rotation of 3D models;

Performance when viewing Yongle Grand Ceremony in low-end devices;

The problem of mark point rotating with model;

Performance problems of ancient books scattered data in first screen rendering.

Detailed technical solutions, for example.

For example, the first step is to restore the original appearance of Yongle Grand Ceremony 360 degrees. ByteDance uses different light sources such as point light, parallel light and diffuse reflection light, and configures different positions, angles, illumination intensity, light source color and light source attenuation of these light sources.

The map combination of the book surface includes bump map, normal map, light map, etc., which work together on the model to restore the original appearance of Yongle Canon.

On the other hand, they use the ShadowMaterial component to achieve the effect of the ceremony on the desktop by adjusting the position, rotation angle and transparency of the component.

Through these technologies, we can see the digital version of Yongle Grand Ceremony lifelike.

For example, in terms of controlling the 360-degree rotation of the model, in the past scenes, most of the cameras were orbited around the target through Orbit controls.

However, in this scene, the shadow of Yongle Grand Ceremony needs to be kept at the bottom of the page at all times, so the technician needs to construct the model so that it can follow the mouse 360 degrees and realize the inertia rotation of the model.

In order to enable low-end performance devices to view the digital version of Yongle Grand Ceremony smoothly, technicians of ByteDance have also innovated and optimized related applications, such as lazy loading of materials inside books, compression of model source files, on-demand loading of model animation frames, preloading of models, and so on.

Using these tools, they effectively optimize performance and give users a smoother experience.

Finally, there is also the issue of ancient books scattered data rendering on the first screen. In this project, the dispersion data needs to draw more than 80 line segments on the first screen with animation effects. How to make the animation of these 80 line segments appear smoothly and without stagnation? Byte team realized a component of line segment material by means of custom material.

That is, by passing the length of the segment into the material, draw the dotted line at equal distances; and then control the length of the segment rendering through the percentage parameter passed in, so as to achieve high-performance segment animation.

In a word, the technical innovation and application of the R & D team of ByteDance laid a solid foundation for the digital library project of Yongle Grand Ceremony and paved the way for readers to read the original text better. Its significance is self-evident.

Of course, to do this project well, only technological innovation is definitely not enough. Therefore, the academic advisory team from Peking University also plays an important role.

Since the beginning of the project, they have relied on the Digital Humanities Research Center of Peking University to jointly plan the digitalization scheme, and constantly coordinate the national map publishing house and byte R & D designers. On the one hand, high-definition image materials of ancient books were obtained from Guotu Publishing House and attached to each chapter; on the other hand, the historical background of Yongle Grand Ceremony was introduced to the byte team.

Last year, the National Library opened two exhibitions, one is "Yongle Grand Ceremony" Special Exhibition,"the other is" Chinese Ancient Books History Exhibition." After watching the exhibition, the ByteDance team collectively spent a lot of time learning relevant ancient books knowledge, from the content composition of Yongle Grand Ceremony to knowledge management mode, then to program design and art design.

In this process, they constantly communicated with Peking University's academic advisory team and listened to suggestions. Only through close cooperation between the two sides did the digitization of Yongle Grand Ceremony achieve more than expected results.

This "beyond expectations," first of all, the 3D form breaks through the usual two-dimensional way of using pictures, which is a big innovation, and secondly, the overall effect produced by the ByteDance team is really friendly to readers and vivid, which is very important.

Why do you say that?

Because Yongle Grand Ceremony itself was actually a popular reading material, it was not all boring and difficult to understand, but a fusion of classical culture and popular culture. Zhu Di did not compile Yongle Grand Ceremony completely according to the traditional royal ideological guidance, but deliberately contained a lot of folk knowledge, which also made it rich and readable.

Popular reading should be disseminated in a way that is close to the public. The digitization of Yongle Grand Ceremony this time also reflects this purpose. For the next dissemination, the expert team also planned as many as 15 dissemination schemes, all of which are to avoid textbooks, such as cooperating with the creators of chattering literature and history, releasing several sets of interesting videos explaining ancient books, etc., in order not to make ancient books isolated islands, but to lower the threshold and reach more people.

On reflection, without digital technology and the efforts invested by all parties in this project, Yongle Grand Ceremony may just be a cultural relic placed in a museum, in which the written ideas are difficult to relate to the public.

With the support of this public welfare digital platform, the value and glory of Yongle Grand Ceremony can be re-released, and new vitality will be radiated in the new era.

More importantly, with the successful case of this Yongle Grand Ceremony digital library project as an experience, we can also expect that the digitization process of more classical books will be promoted in the future, and the public will be able to appreciate the connotation and style of traditional culture again.

It can be said that this is a matter of merit in the present and benefit in the future.

When seeing China's long-standing traditional cultural and artistic treasures polished away by modern technology, the dust of history and time shines again, this wonderful feeling is believed to touch everyone.

Perhaps this is the best scientific humanism.

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