In 79 AD, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius destroyed the Italian city of Pompeii,
and with it, the Temple of Apollo. The remaining ruins were discovered in the
18th century, and during the subsequent excavation, a group of French students
painted their interpretations of the various buildings in the city. In our
efforts in contructing a computer model of the temple, we utilized many of
these students' interpretations.
The model was created exclusively on the PC platform using Autodesk 3D Studio.
By far the most difficult part of this project was modelling of the individual
elements that make up the temple, particularly the columns and the surrounding
roof. Issues such as scaling, texture, and lighting arose
constantly, and the solution for dealing with each new problem was not always
apparent. In any case, our modelling skills benefitted greatly from tackling
a project of this size.
Before we began modelling, we searched for books and periodicals containing information on the temple. Particularly, we were interested in those resources containing artists' conceptions of what the temple was supposed to have looked like before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These pictures would later provide us with the necessary texture maps to apply to our model.
The paintings done by the French students in the 1800's were extremely
helpful. We scanned the paintings in and used actual portions of
these scans in the model. For instance, the roof of the temple, the interior
wall painting of the surrounding wall, and the frieze above the colonnade all
came from the books found in our research.
Each of the final pictures took upwards of one hour to render.
Greg Tonkin
gtonkin@central.itp.berkeley.edu
Click to go up a level.