City of Kaminaljuyu
City of Kaminaljuyu - Massimo Stefani |
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) Representation of the City of Kaminaljuyu in the Miraflores Museum in Guatemala |
Massimo Stefani is an architect who works on different Archeological Projects, making three dimensional representations
of archeological sites.
He is specialized in the Maya preclassic architecture, so the reconstruction of the preclassic city of Kaminaljuyu
(actually under the modern town of Guatemala City) was one of his most exciting projects!
Reconstructing an Ancient City with Vue d'Esprit
In order to reconstruct the great southern Maya City of Kaminaljuyu, Massimo needed a loyal high-end application, capable of withstanding millions and millions of polygons, and without any hesitation, he chose Vue d'Esprit 4 to give concrete expression to his grandiose project."This is the largest project I have ever worked on, so I was really anxious to obtain a good result, and thanks to Vue d'Esprit, I did!" adds Massimo.
Below is the first image ever seen of the entirely reconstructed site:
 That's 13875365 polygons and 246 objects! |
Massimo kindly agreed to tell us a little more about the steps he followed to create this incredible 3D representation of the "City of Kaminaljuyu":
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Massimo started by scanning the 2D hand-drawn maps he had and joinning all the pieces together.
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He then put the map in CAD (Allplan FT - Nemetschek) to create the DTM (Digital Terrain Modelling).
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| Basic Structures | ||
The third phase consisted of elevating the structures in the same CAD program, based on Dr. Juan Antonio Valdés' archaelogical results.
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Massimo then exported the 3D model from Allplan FT to Vue d’Esprit 4 in a 3DS format, divided all the structure and the DTM in Vue layers to optimize the textures application;
He created the DTM of the real Guatemala City Valley with vulcanoes and vegetation.
Massimo then created the textures for the structures by manipulating the original Vue-landscape-textures to obtain the desired result.
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He now had to work on the atmosphere to obtain the same idea of light and sky as in this region of central america.
"Vue's atmosphere editor lets you select a standard or volumetric model and then choose parameters for sun, light, fog and haze, clouds and miscellaneous effects (such as stars, rainbows and the like). That's more than enough parameters to create and adjust custom atmospheres, along with a whole separate material editor for clouds." says Massimo.
He then rendered different scenes before choosing the adequate one, and sending it to Dr. Valdes, the eminent Guatemalan archaeologist, formally in charge of organizing the new Kaminaljuyu museum in Guatemala City.
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Two images are now in the main room of the museum, printed in large format:
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Why Massimo Prefers Vue d'Esprit:
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"Vue d’Esprit is the best rendering program for landscape and outdoor images that I have ever seen. The program is really simple to use, very user friendly and one can obtain the best quality in a really short time!" |
www.archeografica.org: check out Massimo Stefani's projects!
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