7 ms·

Rome in 3D

167 points by GizmoSwan 6y ago

GizmoSwan 6y ago
I found virtual 3rd trailer about Colosseum district to be amazing.
boffinism 6y ago
"an attempt to give you an opportunity to take a look at Rome as it really was, by the eyes of humans who lived there in that time". They never mention _which_ time. Do we think they know that Rome still exists?
- jb1991 6y ago
  320 AD in the video.
- Gys 6y ago
  The videos refer to 320 AD. I agree it should be more clearly stated.
pmontra 6y ago
Great project. It would be even greater if they add people in the streets, possibly walking, not static. That would turn it into a real city and not only perfectly conserved ruins.
cableshaft 6y ago
Needs an assassin that likes to climb up the side of buildings and fall from the top into haystacks, but otherwise, very cool.
- thih9 6y ago
  Could you elaborate? Is this a pop culture reference?
  - maxnoe 6y ago
    The Assassin's Creed video game series
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    It is. Assassin's Creed games are often set in places and time periods where they can have the assassin climb on famous landmarks and ancient architectures. Rome was a location you could visit in at least one of the games (I want to say both Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood), and you could even climb the Colosseum itself. So when I saw the video, it instantly made me think of the game. As for the haystack reference, a common trope in Assassin's Creed games is to reveal a region you have to find a tall structure and climb to the top. Usually they let you jump off from the very top and fall into something to break your fall, usually a haystack. It's super unrealistic but saves you the effort of climbing back down again. You can see the Colosseum climbing in action in this video, although the time period in the game it's a ruin already, including the fall into a haystack: https://youtu.be/gkHTYydSPks https://youtu.be/gkHTYydSPks
  - acomjean 6y ago
    Ubisoft did a lot of research when created their world. They added having some education components to accient Greece. https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+assassin%27s+creed+tour https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+assassin%27s+creed+t...
- icefrakker 6y ago
  I don't get why people feel the need to shove pop culture references into everything. Why not share a meme too while you're at it?
- Udik 6y ago
  Frankly I was thinking too of Assassin's Creed. I've never played it but from videos I've seen it looks like they're able to give the impression of entire cities recreated with a fair level of accuracy, and populated with crowds, animals and everyday objects, with realistic elements such dirt and smoke. I wonder how hard it would be to port the material used to create these videos (that might be accurate from a historical point of view but overall look way too schematic) to AC's engine- not to enjoy killing enemies in the context if the imperial Rome, but to provide a realistic environment to move through in real time. I think it would be loved by casual users and specialists alike. For example, check this reconstruction of Athens in the 5th century BCE, it beats these ancient Rome videos in every possible way: https://youtu.be/-a8cWF-29lI https://youtu.be/-a8cWF-29lI
diego_moita 6y ago
Belissimo! I went to Rome a couple years ago and this adds a lot to understand what I saw. But there's one thing I'd love to see: the filth and life. I want to see horse manure and mud on the streets, urine and faeces pouring from houses, the immense slums that would surround the city but left so few archaeological remains, graffiti on the walls, wear and tear on the streets (like what you can see in Pompei), the smoke from kitchens, pubs and bakeries, etc.
- simplicio 6y ago
  Not 1:1 recreations, but the Assasins Creed games scratch this itch. Im not a big video-gamer, but do love history, so usually buy them when the price drops down to a couple bucks just cause its neat to spend a couple hours walking around the historical recreations.
  - Brakenshire 6y ago
    Would love for someone to buy up the rights to use the engine and models for Assassin’s Creed and develop stories which are historically realistic.
    - Udik 6y ago
      Building upon this idea: UbiSoft could license a version of the engine stripped of its game features (e.g. combats & health, climbing of buildings) with the purpose of creating historical reconstructions. These would be open source projects supervised by historians; every single detail could be discussed and improved, and changes merged via pull requests. Maybe UbiSoft's interest in the deal would be the free usage of the generated contents in the next instalments of its game.
      - lachenmayer 6y ago
        They already do this, it's called "Discovery Mode" and is specifically aimed at education. See this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMDdQKfv70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMDdQKfv70 It's also available as a stand-alone if you don't already own the game: https://store.ubi.com/upc/discovery-tour-by-assassin-s-creed-ancient-egypt/5a7d728d0c8ee45b54018f25.html?edition=Ancient%20Egypt https://store.ubi.com/upc/discovery-tour-by-assassin-s-creed...
SeeManDo 6y ago
Reminds me of this project, well done: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Synagogues_in_Germany/5jZUAAAAMAAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Synagogues_in_Germany/5... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cluU6n2W0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cluU6n2W0c
dinkleberg 6y ago
This is really cool. It's unclear if this is a community effort or not (getting page timeouts), but it would be great to see some experts in texture and lighting help bring this to the next level because the models already look great.
spurgu 6y ago
Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
- amelius 6y ago
  Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btKooS7k3nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btKooS7k3nw
  - spurgu 6y ago
    Thanks!
billfruit 6y ago
Any general use tools which can be used for such large scale modelling, not including minecraft which actually speaking seems terrible for the purpose.
ROARosen 6y ago
Here we go! Seems to have been Hacker-bombed. Not accessible to me right now. (Error 508 Resource Limit Is Reached)
T-A 6y ago
Newer (Dec 16, 2020) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kveAOZfDA44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kveAOZfDA44
canada_dry 6y ago
To think that this is roughly 3 centuries after Nero and the great fire! Incredible history.
personlurking 6y ago
Here's an AMA by someone who also made a 3D model of Rome https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yf9rm/iama_classics_lecturer_and_roman_expert_who_spent/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yf9rm/iama_...
cblconfederate 6y ago
Love these. I think the studio Altair4 makes some of the best visualizations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIEYmxFgF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIEYmxFgF4. I once made a model of rome myself in opensim ;)
- mstade 6y ago
  Great video, thanks for sharing! I’ve visited Rome a few times and most of the areas in the video I know quite well, it was really fun to see a visualization of the old buildings. The Pompeii theatre blew my mind! I wish they’d done the pantheon though. I know it wouldn’t be as impressive as the other renders – Forum Romanum was amazing – but I’d love to see the front of it intact with the gold ornaments and what not. Great video nonetheless!
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Pantheon is among their other videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2E44dz5sFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2E44dz5sFk
- dolmen 6y ago
  Thanks. Those videos are much more interesting.
martimarkov 6y ago
I wonder what engine they use for this. It doesn't seem to be Unreal, Unigine or Unity. I'd be curious to learn which one it is and why they choose it. :)
f6v 6y ago
Well done, great to see the Sevastopol university alumn here!
madhadron 6y ago
The only thing that makes me sad in this is that the buildings, especially the big monuments and temples, are plain white, and not brightly painted.
- HuShifang 6y ago
  I was wondering about this too. Elsewhere on their site they discuss recoloring marble busts of the caesars, so they may not be unaware of this...
- GizmoSwan 6y ago
  They are not white, the are color of the stones and concrete with some details that were painted. Here is one the monuments in color. Look for the video within the content. https://relivehistoryin3d.com/2019/11/10/trajans-column-full-color-reconstruction/ https://relivehistoryin3d.com/2019/11/10/trajans-column-full... More about the history of the monument: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/trajan-column/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/trajan-column/
  - madhadron 6y ago
    I went and watched another video from them and saw much more coloring. Must have been just a quirk of where I started.
fatbird 6y ago
This seems like a ripe topic for an academic/open source wiki approach to 3D modeling and representation. Imagine if some group, or academic consortium, got funding to build an MMO world and to make available to academics the tools to build it out--3D modelers like Sketchup for buildings, behavioural scripting for NPCs, economic modeling of the surrounding environment... all available for people to walk through. Obviously no one history department has the budget to licence a serious game engine or maintain an open world; but one would think an endowment from a benefactor plus cooperation and funding from a group of seed universities would be enough to get it started.
- prox 6y ago
  As someone who used to make architectural visualizations (I was trained as visualiser) , it would be great to set up some sort of Patreon / Sponsorship with interested parties. I think this is something that could work with the right crew. Would definitely be in. The content could even be favorably licensed so historically accurate games and teachings in ancient history could be made.
hobo_mark 6y ago
Is anybody working on an AR version of this? Where you walk through an archeological site and can see through your phone how it looked originally? I have been looking now and then but can't find anything like what I have in mind.
- Cybotron3000 6y ago
  I made an iOS/Swift audio app. designed specifically for this purpose 2/3 years ago. I got discouraged as I didn’t have the time/resources to work on it further/make more content for it/other products came out like Microsoft Soundscape etc that I thought were basically similar in some ways... Essentially it was spatial audio coupled with common game engine audio functionality and location/orientation tracking... I’d be very happy if anyone out there could find a use for it/was interested. I thought about uploading it to GitHub/sim., but being an audio designer/musician primarily I was a bit hesitant about the quality of my efforts... did work though when tested at the time...
mlok 6y ago
There's an interesting mini-series on Arte (German-French funded TV channel without ads) which talks about History in videogames : https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/074699-004-A/history-s-creed-4-10/ https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/074699-004-A/history-s-creed-4... "Kingdom Come Deliverance was created with crowdfunding to satisfy a hunger for historically accurate games. Extremely well researched, it provides a realistic portrayal of Bohemia in the middle ages avoiding all clichés."

167 points by GizmoSwan 6y ago

I found virtual 3rd trailer about Colosseum district to be amazing.

"an attempt to give you an opportunity to take a look at Rome as it really was, by the eyes of humans who lived there in that time". They never mention _which_ time. Do we think they know that Rome still exists?

jb1991 6y ago
320 AD in the video.
Gys 6y ago
The videos refer to 320 AD. I agree it should be more clearly stated.

pmontra 6y ago

Great project. It would be even greater if they add people in the streets, possibly walking, not static. That would turn it into a real city and not only perfectly conserved ruins.

cableshaft 6y ago

Needs an assassin that likes to climb up the side of buildings and fall from the top into haystacks, but otherwise, very cool.

thih9 6y ago
Could you elaborate? Is this a pop culture reference?
- maxnoe 6y ago
  The Assassin's Creed video game series
- cableshaft 6y ago
  It is. Assassin's Creed games are often set in places and time periods where they can have the assassin climb on famous landmarks and ancient architectures. Rome was a location you could visit in at least one of the games (I want to say both Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood), and you could even climb the Colosseum itself. So when I saw the video, it instantly made me think of the game. As for the haystack reference, a common trope in Assassin's Creed games is to reveal a region you have to find a tall structure and climb to the top. Usually they let you jump off from the very top and fall into something to break your fall, usually a haystack. It's super unrealistic but saves you the effort of climbing back down again. You can see the Colosseum climbing in action in this video, although the time period in the game it's a ruin already, including the fall into a haystack: https://youtu.be/gkHTYydSPks https://youtu.be/gkHTYydSPks
- acomjean 6y ago
  Ubisoft did a lot of research when created their world. They added having some education components to accient Greece. https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+assassin%27s+creed+tour https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+assassin%27s+creed+t...
icefrakker 6y ago
I don't get why people feel the need to shove pop culture references into everything. Why not share a meme too while you're at it?
Udik 6y ago
Frankly I was thinking too of Assassin's Creed. I've never played it but from videos I've seen it looks like they're able to give the impression of entire cities recreated with a fair level of accuracy, and populated with crowds, animals and everyday objects, with realistic elements such dirt and smoke. I wonder how hard it would be to port the material used to create these videos (that might be accurate from a historical point of view but overall look way too schematic) to AC's engine- not to enjoy killing enemies in the context if the imperial Rome, but to provide a realistic environment to move through in real time. I think it would be loved by casual users and specialists alike. For example, check this reconstruction of Athens in the 5th century BCE, it beats these ancient Rome videos in every possible way: https://youtu.be/-a8cWF-29lI https://youtu.be/-a8cWF-29lI

diego_moita 6y ago

Belissimo! I went to Rome a couple years ago and this adds a lot to understand what I saw. But there's one thing I'd love to see: the filth and life. I want to see horse manure and mud on the streets, urine and faeces pouring from houses, the immense slums that would surround the city but left so few archaeological remains, graffiti on the walls, wear and tear on the streets (like what you can see in Pompei), the smoke from kitchens, pubs and bakeries, etc.

simplicio 6y ago
Not 1:1 recreations, but the Assasins Creed games scratch this itch. Im not a big video-gamer, but do love history, so usually buy them when the price drops down to a couple bucks just cause its neat to spend a couple hours walking around the historical recreations.
- Brakenshire 6y ago
  Would love for someone to buy up the rights to use the engine and models for Assassin’s Creed and develop stories which are historically realistic.
  - Udik 6y ago
    Building upon this idea: UbiSoft could license a version of the engine stripped of its game features (e.g. combats & health, climbing of buildings) with the purpose of creating historical reconstructions. These would be open source projects supervised by historians; every single detail could be discussed and improved, and changes merged via pull requests. Maybe UbiSoft's interest in the deal would be the free usage of the generated contents in the next instalments of its game.
    - lachenmayer 6y ago
      They already do this, it's called "Discovery Mode" and is specifically aimed at education. See this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMDdQKfv70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMDdQKfv70 It's also available as a stand-alone if you don't already own the game: https://store.ubi.com/upc/discovery-tour-by-assassin-s-creed-ancient-egypt/5a7d728d0c8ee45b54018f25.html?edition=Ancient%20Egypt https://store.ubi.com/upc/discovery-tour-by-assassin-s-creed...

SeeManDo 6y ago

Reminds me of this project, well done: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Synagogues_in_Germany/5jZUAAAAMAAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Synagogues_in_Germany/5... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cluU6n2W0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cluU6n2W0c

dinkleberg 6y ago

This is really cool. It's unclear if this is a community effort or not (getting page timeouts), but it would be great to see some experts in texture and lighting help bring this to the next level because the models already look great.

spurgu 6y ago

Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.

amelius 6y ago
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btKooS7k3nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btKooS7k3nw
- spurgu 6y ago
  Thanks!

billfruit 6y ago

Any general use tools which can be used for such large scale modelling, not including minecraft which actually speaking seems terrible for the purpose.

ROARosen 6y ago

Here we go! Seems to have been Hacker-bombed. Not accessible to me right now. (Error 508 Resource Limit Is Reached)

T-A 6y ago

Newer (Dec 16, 2020) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kveAOZfDA44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kveAOZfDA44

canada_dry 6y ago

To think that this is roughly 3 centuries after Nero and the great fire! Incredible history.

personlurking 6y ago

Here's an AMA by someone who also made a 3D model of Rome https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yf9rm/iama_classics_lecturer_and_roman_expert_who_spent/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yf9rm/iama_...

cblconfederate 6y ago

Love these. I think the studio Altair4 makes some of the best visualizations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIEYmxFgF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIEYmxFgF4. I once made a model of rome myself in opensim ;)

mstade 6y ago
Great video, thanks for sharing! I’ve visited Rome a few times and most of the areas in the video I know quite well, it was really fun to see a visualization of the old buildings. The Pompeii theatre blew my mind! I wish they’d done the pantheon though. I know it wouldn’t be as impressive as the other renders – Forum Romanum was amazing – but I’d love to see the front of it intact with the gold ornaments and what not. Great video nonetheless!
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Pantheon is among their other videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2E44dz5sFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2E44dz5sFk
dolmen 6y ago
Thanks. Those videos are much more interesting.

martimarkov 6y ago

I wonder what engine they use for this. It doesn't seem to be Unreal, Unigine or Unity. I'd be curious to learn which one it is and why they choose it. :)

f6v 6y ago

Well done, great to see the Sevastopol university alumn here!

madhadron 6y ago

The only thing that makes me sad in this is that the buildings, especially the big monuments and temples, are plain white, and not brightly painted.

HuShifang 6y ago
I was wondering about this too. Elsewhere on their site they discuss recoloring marble busts of the caesars, so they may not be unaware of this...
GizmoSwan 6y ago
They are not white, the are color of the stones and concrete with some details that were painted. Here is one the monuments in color. Look for the video within the content. https://relivehistoryin3d.com/2019/11/10/trajans-column-full-color-reconstruction/ https://relivehistoryin3d.com/2019/11/10/trajans-column-full... More about the history of the monument: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/trajan-column/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/trajan-column/
- madhadron 6y ago
  I went and watched another video from them and saw much more coloring. Must have been just a quirk of where I started.

fatbird 6y ago

This seems like a ripe topic for an academic/open source wiki approach to 3D modeling and representation. Imagine if some group, or academic consortium, got funding to build an MMO world and to make available to academics the tools to build it out--3D modelers like Sketchup for buildings, behavioural scripting for NPCs, economic modeling of the surrounding environment... all available for people to walk through. Obviously no one history department has the budget to licence a serious game engine or maintain an open world; but one would think an endowment from a benefactor plus cooperation and funding from a group of seed universities would be enough to get it started.

prox 6y ago
As someone who used to make architectural visualizations (I was trained as visualiser) , it would be great to set up some sort of Patreon / Sponsorship with interested parties. I think this is something that could work with the right crew. Would definitely be in. The content could even be favorably licensed so historically accurate games and teachings in ancient history could be made.

hobo_mark 6y ago

Is anybody working on an AR version of this? Where you walk through an archeological site and can see through your phone how it looked originally? I have been looking now and then but can't find anything like what I have in mind.

Cybotron3000 6y ago
I made an iOS/Swift audio app. designed specifically for this purpose 2/3 years ago. I got discouraged as I didn’t have the time/resources to work on it further/make more content for it/other products came out like Microsoft Soundscape etc that I thought were basically similar in some ways... Essentially it was spatial audio coupled with common game engine audio functionality and location/orientation tracking... I’d be very happy if anyone out there could find a use for it/was interested. I thought about uploading it to GitHub/sim., but being an audio designer/musician primarily I was a bit hesitant about the quality of my efforts... did work though when tested at the time...

mlok 6y ago

There's an interesting mini-series on Arte (German-French funded TV channel without ads) which talks about History in videogames : https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/074699-004-A/history-s-creed-4-10/ https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/074699-004-A/history-s-creed-4... "Kingdom Come Deliverance was created with crowdfunding to satisfy a hunger for historically accurate games. Extremely well researched, it provides a realistic portrayal of Bohemia in the middle ages avoiding all clichés."